


Charcoal

by luvkurai



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Artist AU, Child Abuse, Developing Relationship, F/M, Kylo gets obsessed way too fast, PTSD, Possessive Behavior, Stalking, Student!Rey, Temper Tantrums, artist!Kylo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-26
Updated: 2017-02-19
Packaged: 2018-05-16 11:41:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 31,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5827282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luvkurai/pseuds/luvkurai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i> It has stained his fingers black and, when he turns, she sees it smeared across his forehead, his lips, and the curve of his left cheekbone. She raises a hand to his face, but before she can rub her thumb through the color, his hands are on her.</i>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Rey takes a break from her studies to go to the opening for an art gallery that just so happens to feature Coruscant's up-and-coming Kylo Ren.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hi all. This was meant to be a smutty oneshot but then emotions got in the way and now it's a multi-chapter work. Expect angst. Also warning for mentions of (nonsexual) child abuse, and (mild) PTSD. Kylo Ren is Kylo Ren.

She shouldn’t be doing this.

It’s her one night off of work this week and her time would be better spent at home studying for an upcoming test. But she’s missed the last three free gallery openings in town because of work and she worried there won’t be time for her non-engineering pursuits like this once she graduates in the spring.

 _Just twenty minutes,_ she tells herself as she steps through the open doors of the gallery. She’d promised Finn and Poe that she would meet them in the library for a study session at nine o’clock, and it was forty minutes by bus back to campus. She rolls her eyes at the memory of telling them where she was going the first time, a few months back—their surprised laughter. She loves Finn and Poe and, if she’s honest with herself, doesn’t blame them. Sneaking off to art gallery openings in her free time isn’t what people expect of by-the-books, engineering-student Rey.

She loves her subject and is excited about her future profession, for reasons more than the money she’ll make—though she grew up in the foster system and she’d have to be stupid to discount the importance of stable employment. She likes the feeling of understanding how something _works_ and being able to fix it. When she was a kid, she would take apart other kids’ broken electric cars and tinker with their insides. In high school, her favorite class was physics. Her teacher gave her the inspiration to apply for a mechanical engineering degree at Coruscant Polytechnic Institute and a recommendation letter good enough to earn her a full scholarship.

But deep down _this_ had always been her passion. Her own skills are hardly something extraordinary; she admittedly barely practices these days and she refuses to let herself spend all her savings from her part time job on things like expensive watercolors and fancy sketchbooks when she can only just afford to feed herself. She sketches when she can—mostly in short, meditative bursts that get her through long all-nighters before big due dates.

In the margins of notebooks she sketches familiar faces from her bus route; on the back of old tests she recreates lonesome pieces of jagged machinery seen on the side of the road; on old, ripped envelopes she struggles to piece together the fragments of the foster homes she grew up in. She isn’t sentimental about her art (if she could bring herself to call the shreds of old paper _art_ )—all but a few treasured drawings go straight into the trash. For her, the finished product is less important than the feeling of calm that comes over her when she drags her pencil effortlessly across the page. As if all the negative feelings—that specific brand of isolation, from before she got out of the foster system—have dissipated into nothing. At least for one blissful moment.

As she unloops her scarf from her neck, Rey’s eyes trail over a few sculptures hanging from the wall by the entrance—all wire and metal and noise. A few iron pieces catch her eyes momentarily, but it’s the paintings beyond them that really hold her. Five pieces, on varying sized canvases, are arranged in a line. They’re abstract, but she knows, almost instinctively, that they are all by the same artist.

What strikes her first is the feeling of unease that comes over her when she looks at them. It isn’t that they are ugly—they are certainly the best in the gallery. Rather, there’s an energy dripping off of them that she can’t name, but it’s so thick she can feel gooseflesh prickle her arms. The first in the line is entirely in fiery reds and black, burning hot. The artist uses a thick paint that probably takes days to dry, and it rises off the canvas toward Rey. She glances over at the name.

 _Cauterize 4. Kylo Ren_.

The others are similar, all vibrant colors, piled on so thickly Rey could reach out and rip a chunk off. She could strip the paint from the canvas, piece by piece. _Cauterize 1, Cauterize 2, Cauterize 3_ , presented as a set. But where she expects to find the final, she finds a larger canvas, so tall it leaves little space between it and the floor and ceiling.

Like the others, the paint is heavily applied, its true thickness only seen where the artist has slashed across the paint while it dried, forming long caverns, perilous cliffs. And like the others, it is decidedly abstract, but only barely. Rey swears the rippled lines across the middle is an approximation of the horizon, the half below some indefinable terrain (perhaps waters or unstable ground), while the half above, so dark blue it’s almost black, is a moonless sky.

It’s lonely.

* * *

 

He hates going to these things.

If the gallery owner—a man named Hux that seems to always have a sour look on his face—hadn’t _insisted_ on every featured artist being present, he wouldn’t have bothered. From the seat in the corner that he claimed before the first guests were allowed in, he glowers around the room. Nearby, a fellow artist sucks up to a wealthy patron in a suit. Kylo slides his eyes over to that artist’s work, the chunks of impersonal metal that would be better served as tableware.

The glass of scotch in his hand is empty and he’s _dying_ for a cigarette. Pained, he forfeits his seat to stand and make his way through the crowd to the bar. The bartender gives him a starry-eyed look that tells him she knows who he is. It had been happening more and more often since a local magazine did a piece on him following his last showcase. He’d set off his apartment’s fire alarm when he put his lighter to the whole magazine when he read what they said about him. Not his art. Him.

 _‘Unhinged’._ Some people in this business loved perpetuating the ‘suffering artist’ stereotype and it made him sick.

Still, in the weeks since that article was published, he had received twice as many invitations to showcase his work as usual. He shoots the bartender a smile, pushes his hair behind his ear and promptly receives a free drink. He only barely manages to leave before she can ask for his number.

Sure enough, his seat has been claimed. Swallowing down his irritation along with half the scotch, he considers leaving. If someone is interested in buying, Hux can let him know later. Furthermore, staying will require at least a few more drinks, and he drove here. He breathes so deeply his lungs burn and imagines smashing the faux-crystal glass against one of his own paintings. Already he hears the sound echoing around his head, and for the first time in hours, he spares a glance at his own paintings. There’s a man glancing between _Cauterize 1_ and _2_ , gesturing to his companion. Probably making some attempt at wooing her by pretending to understand art. He’s disgusted by this whole thing.

In front of _Untitled_ is a woman standing alone and Kylo is immediately irked to see that she hasn’t even bothered to remove her thrift store coat. He can tell from a distance that she’s young, not older than 20, surely—though her height could have a hand in making her look younger. He thinks he’s right though, judging by the book bag hanging off one of her shoulders. _Untitled_ is the largest painting Kylo has ever done, and she is dwarfed by it. Her neck arches as she brings her eye line slowly up the span of it.

Kylo watches as she surveys his work. Whole minutes pass and she doesn’t move away from it, doesn’t move at all except to take half a step backward to get a better look. He feels increasingly rattled, the longer she stands there, and all at once he doesn’t know why he allowed _Untitled_ to be shown here. The painting is suddenly too personal for such callous display. He wants to cross the room and pull it from the wall himself—just so this girl stops looking at it.

But he feels—a swooping feeling in his gut, like falling—that it might be too late. She’s already seen too much. 

* * *

  

“Are you a student?”

The baritone voice comes sharply from just behind her. She turns reluctantly from the painting. The man is about a foot taller than her, with sharp, brown eyes and broad lips. His dark hair is grown out to his chin, combed away from his face. He’s older than her, maybe thirty, and dressed in a blazer over a black t-shirt.

“Yes, but not art.” Annoyance creeps into her voice, despite herself. There’s something in the accusative way he’s looking at her, like she’s done something wrong. Furthermore, she didn’t come here to meet men, and he’s pulled her away from the painting.

“What then?”

“Engineering.” Expectedly, he’s visibly surprised. She fishes her phone out of her coat pocket, half to check the time and half to send him a message that she doesn’t want to be bothered.

He doesn’t take the hint. “Why are you here, then?”

The question is surprisingly abrasive and she replies with a hostile glare and, “The event is free to the public.”

_Go away._

His eyes widen and he seems to remember himself. “No, you’re right. I just meant—“ Apparently needing to further collect himself, he pauses, and she glances at her phone again. Her bus leaves in ten minutes, and it’s a five minute walk to the stop from here. It couldn’t hurt to be a bit early. “—You’ve been…looking at this painting for a while.”

“I _like_ it.” The words are heavy in her mouth, like a lie. _Like_ doesn’t quite describe her feelings about it. In truth, she’d felt faint before he walked up. Self-deprecating, _detestable_ thoughts— _hunger, fear—_ that she’d been so successful for so long at holding at bay came spilling out.

She senses more questioning coming, and speaks flatly before he can get the words out: “I like the colors.”

It’s such a stupid, ridiculous thing to say that for a second she considers throwing courtesies out the window and walking away from sheer embarrassment. The twitch of one of his eyebrows makes her wonder if he expects her to.

Despite herself, she lets her eyes drift back towards the painting, and almost immediately feels her eyes burning. She swallows thickly, trying to think of anything but what the lines and shapes remind her of. When she looks away, she finds the man staring at her, intently.

Her heart skips a beat, and she finds herself looking at him through fresh eyes. He’s handsome, well-dressed, and, when he speaks again, his low, almost monotone voice warms her insides. And he really hasn’t said anything so wrong.

“Are you here alone?” His voice has gone gentler. She nods. “I am as well.”

She surprises herself by making conversation. “Are you a collector?”

“No. An artist.” She supposes that members of the city’s art scene would all know one another—it would not be strange to attend a friend’s showing.

Rey steps away from _Untitled,_ to the right, to the next painting on the wall. As she moves, she realizes her body language has opened up, inviting him wordlessly to walk with her. He follows, coming just a step too close for Rey to comfortably meet his eyes. She lifts her face and is thrown off balance again by the way he’s looking at her. She glances unseeingly at the painting, just to look somewhere other than his gaze.

Her heartbeat thumps in her ears, roaring even over the sounds of the crowd milling about the gallery. She tries, desperately, to focus on the painting in front of her, but instead she nibbles at her lip, tugs at a stray lock of hair. She can only control herself for so long before she looks back. Back at his eyes, so dark and deep—

“Can I buy you a drink?” He asks. She wonders vaguely if he’s blinked at all in the last five minutes. “Please?”

“Ok,” she answers, without thinking. She blinks and comes to her senses, remembers her plans with her friends, her bus. “No—sorry, I can’t, I’ve got plans.” 

* * *

 

Frustration bubbles up from his stomach. She’s stringing him along, teasing him. She thinks this is a game.

“Plans,” he says flatly. He opens his mouth to ask _what, where,_ and _with whom_.

“Ren!” Hux appears suddenly beside him and Kylo realizes all at once a crowd of people surrounds the two of them.

“Mr. and Mrs. Richards,” Hux continues. “I’d like to introduce you to Kylo Ren. They were just telling me how much they like your _Cauterize_ series.”

Kylo could honestly strangle Hux where he stands. He doesn’t look away from the girl as realization dawns on her face—the tell is in the way she glances past him to his paintings.

“I’m sure you can handle it,” he says to Hux, sparing the potential buyers not so much as a second glance before turning his eyes back to the girl, but she’s already stepping away. For a second, he watches her back and feels the floor drop out from under him.

“Wait,” he says lowly, grasping her arm through the fabric of her coat. When she turns and pulls her arm from his grip, her fingers slip through his own. It’s the first time he’s touched her, and it’s all he can do not to take her narrow wrist in his hand again, to feel her pulse.

“I have to go,” she says. “I have to catch the bus.”

He shakes his head. He’s being ridiculous (he’s being _unhinged_ ), but the thought of watching her walk away from him makes his blood go cold. He needs to talk to her, to ask her what she saw in his painting. He needs to touch her. “Where are you going? I have a car. I can drive you.”

A blush rises in her cheeks at his insistence, and all he can think about is what she would look like—naked in his bed. The thought sends heat rushing through his veins, to places he can’t pay mind to right now.

She shakes her head, but there’s a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth, and he’s transfixed by the way her eyes crinkle at the corners. It takes a staggering moment to realize that she’s smiling _at him_. An unfamiliar giddiness takes root in the back of his head. _Fucking pull yourself together._

“No, it’s alright, you need to stay.” It is most certainly _not alright._

“I insist. Really, you’d be doing me a favor, I hate these interactions.” Right at this moment, he hates everything but her smile. She bites her lip, hesitant, but the hesitation means there’s a chance. “Please? Where are you going?” 

* * *

 

No one has ever, not in her whole life, looked at her the way that Kylo Ren is looking at her right now. It makes her feel self-conscious and powerful all at once, an intoxicating mixture that obstructs that voice in her head telling her that she’s making _a mistake._ She’s playing with _fire_. She tries to remember what she saw in her paintings, but all that anxiety and poisonous emotion from earlier is gone, without a trace, replaced by a strange sense of focus on this man.

“The CPI campus.”

She should be madder about him withholding the information that he is the artist of _that painting_ , but he didn’t _actually_ lie, and she never asked for his name. _Excuses. You should know better than this, Rey._

She’s more or less agreed to his offer, and he’s smiling down at her—a triumphant sort of look that warms her heart and irks her at the same time.

“Just let me grab my coat,” he says, already rushing to the rack by the entrance. She stands waiting for a moment, and sees the man that spoke to Kylo Ren, glaring at her. She stares at the area above his head, refusing to react; she’s aware of where he thinks they’re going.

For a brief, hysterical moment, she imagines herself sucking Kylo off in his car.

The thought is uncharacteristically lewd. She isn’t a virgin, but she may as well be for all the good her one drunken experience will do her. He’s so much older than her. And those paintings…

He gestures her through the door, and when she goes she feels him inches from her back, so close it should feel invasive. It doesn’t. He leads the way to his car, parked down the street.

“What year are you?” He asks conversationally.

“I’ll graduate in the spring.” This is good, any conversation topic other than his painting and why she was standing in front of it for so long. She aches to know _why_ and _how_ , but she doesn’t dare ask.

“Are you from Coruscant?”

“I grew up in Jakku.” She doesn’t bother specifying Niima—no one has ever heard of it. She hasn’t been back to the southern wasteland since starting college, but despite her best efforts, she dreams about it still. She deflects before he can question her about her family. “What about you?”

“I’m from here. I left for a few years, but…the art scene is better here.”

She doesn’t think Jakku even had an art scene—who had the money or the time for such things? But Coruscant is the culture capital of the country. The city sometimes seems to be nothing but chic cafes and boutiques, new galleries opening up every other week. There are bad neighborhoods too, but they’re hidden under the towering metropolis. It scared Rey, when she first got out of Jakku, because she never imagined a place could be so _big_. She was sure she’d get lost in its complicated lay out, but now it’s second nature to her. She can’t imagine going back to the desert.

“Did you always want to do this?”

“Yes, always. I’m not really good at anything else, to be honest.” He laughs a self-effacing laugh, and it’s not really funny, but Rey finds herself grinning solely at the sight of his smile.

“My car,” he says suddenly, gesturing to a black, four-door _TIE_. It’s an old model, with a manual transmission. Vintage and in amazingly good shape. To her surprise he opens the passenger door for her. _Who does that?_ She mutters a _thanks_ , as she gets inside, vaguely remembering what teachers used to say about not getting into strangers’ cars. And Kylo Ren is most certainly a stranger.

While he gets into the driver’s seat, she peers around the car. In the cup holder is an empty soda bottle, and on the floor by her feet is a brown-paper bag and some napkins.

“West on the highway, yeah?” She nods. With his eyes on the road, she has a moment to look at him without worrying about him looking back. It’s dark in the car, with just the streetlights and the glare of other cars to illuminate him.

She can’t deny that he disconcerts part of her. Every once and a while, the red lights from outside catch his features just so, and he looks like an animal, like he would devour her, if given the chance. But then the light changes again, and he’s just endearing, charming as he glances at her out of the side of his eyes and smiles.

* * *

 

She’s looking at him, and he doesn’t quite know what to do. Part of him wants to stop the car on the side of the highway and just pull her into his lap.

“Why don’t you like going to showings?” She asks, out of the blue. _Why would anyone want to be in a place like that?_ Although _she_ was there by choice.

“Don’t like to see my work turned into a commodity,” he says. “And the people that go to those sorts of things are… Art is a status symbol for them. Who finds the next big thing. If someone makes it big, the piece quadruples in value and they get bragging rights for someone else’s hard work and inspiration.”

It strikes him suddenly that he doesn’t have a clue what her name is. He racks his brain for something, anything, but she never introduced herself. She knows his and he wonders if it’s too late to ask.

“You don’t like the commercial aspects,” she says, like she agrees. “But not everyone is a buyer. Some people just want to appreciate what’s been created.”

That’s why she was there, then. _Appreciation._ He barely knows her, but it seems out of character.

He enters the CPI campus and she directs him to the library, where he puts the car in park and finally turns to look at her fully. The light behind her illuminates her brown hair in a halo, and she looks like something from another planet.

“I want to see you again.” The thought of her getting out of this car without a plan to meet has his insides in knots.

To his eternal surprise she says, “I think I’m free this weekend. Can I put my number in your phone?”

He’s already listing the most romantic places in Coruscant in his head. The places most likely to win her over, to make her _his._

She smiles that gorgeous, radiant smile again— _just for him_ —and slips his phone back into the palm of his hand. She lets their hands touch for a second longer, long enough for him to skim his fingertips over the underside of her wrist. When he looks at her face, her eyes are downcast, looking at where they’re touching. She looks stunned. He grasps her wrist and leans forward. Bringing one hand up to her jaw, he holds her close for a moment, looking into her brown eyes before they drift closed in invitation.

He kisses her slowly, exerting an amount of restraint that he didn’t even know he possessed. Her lips are soft, and her mouth falls barely open. He presses his tongue to her bottom lip, letting his teeth graze and explore. Her free hand rests against his chest, griping his jacket like a lifeline. She’s kissing him back, pulling him closer, and Kylo thinks about putting the vehicle in reverse and bringing her home—fuck whatever her _plans_ are.

But too soon, she’s pulling away, opening the door and leaving Kylo alone in his car.

He looks down at his mobile once she’s through the glass doors of the library and sees her number, and above that, her name.

_Rey._


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _He swears that there’s never been anything on this planet as beautiful as her._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for everyone's interest in this fic so far. Shall we begin?

Rey buries her head in her pillow when her alarm goes off. It’s winter and it’s still dark at 7:00 AM. She’s got an 11 o’clock lecture, but needs to get a few hours of studying in first. Her study session with Poe and Finn had been a bust. Finn showed up thirty minutes late, Poe forgot his notes, and she was so distracted every calculation took her three tries to get right. At a certain point, they gave up and Finn and Poe started bickering playfully over which of them would get a higher score on the test.

Slowly, she stretches out her limbs and sits up in bed. Her dorm room is small, but she’s got it all to herself. Most students move off campus after the first year—both Finn and Poe did—but Coruscant rent prices are astronomical, so the school sets aside a number of dorm rooms at reduced prices for financial aid students like Rey (though their cost still wipes out most of her funds for the year). Most of them are from the bad neighborhoods in the city, only a few are like her and from the Outer Rim or the Western Reaches. So few people ever leave those areas of the country, she never lets herself forget how lucky she is. She could be homeless now, leaving off the junkyards of Jakku.

Her walls are decorated with cards she’s received since starting at CPI, a collection of the free sample prints that they give out at art museums and galleries, advertising upcoming shows, and a single picture of herself and her two best friends. She’s been in this room since her second year and she’s invited practically no one inside. Growing up, she never had a room all to herself— _except once—_ and she relishes having her own space. She still has to use a shared bathroom and kitchen, but the room by itself is enough.

She keeps her eyes off her phone as she gets dressed, doesn’t even let herself glance at it when she returns from brushing her teeth. She has an apple for breakfast while she goes through her notes from class. The sun is finally up and she considers going to the kitchen to make herself some instant coffee.

Then, her phone rings. Its an unrecognized number and her heart skips a beat as she answers, even as she tells herself it can’t be him. They had only met the night before, guys never call this quick, and they usually text, right?

“ _Hey.”_ It’s Kylo. Before she can even say hello, he asks, “ _Can I make you dinner tonight?”_

 _Tonight._ It’s Thursday and she specifically remembers saying she could see him on the weekend. “I’m working tonight.”

“ _Until what time?”_ She hesitates. She’s only working until eight today, but she was planning on studying afterwards. She considers telling him as much, but she strangely doesn’t want to upset him, especially when he’s so intent on seeing her again.

“Eight.” The truth is, she can’t stop thinking about that kiss. He was so insistent, but still incredibly gentle.

“ _That’s perfect. I could pick you up?”_

Maybe he thinks she’s a crazy fan, an easy target, overly willing to go to bed with him. _Do artists even have crazy fans?_ She can’t imagine he would think that about her, considering how she’d tried to leave last night. Although, he wouldn’t be wrong about her willingness—she’d spent most of last night tossing and turning, thinking about the way he was looking at her when she pulled away from their kiss. Everything inside her clenched when she thought of it.

But does she want to sleep with him _tonight_? Because that’s what this means.

“It’s no trouble for me to take the bus,” she finally says.

“ _Let me pick you up.”_ His voice is incredibly low, like he’s whispering in her ear. Her toes curl entirely of their own accord. “ _It would be faster. Where do you work?_ ”

“You can pick me up at my dorm.” She wants the chance to change out of her sweaty clothes before she sees him, and something tells her that if she told him what restaurant she waitresses in, he’d show up unannounced every other shift. “8:30.”

After she’s hung up, she can’t breathe from the giddy smile that breaks across her face.

* * *

 

He taps his fingers against the dashboard impatiently. He arrived fifteen minutes early and shouldn’t be shocked that she hasn’t come down yet, but he knows she’s in there and _where is she?_ He peers up at the building, wondering at her still living in dorms at this age. _Convenience, perhaps._ The thought of going in to find her crosses his mind just as she rushes out the doors. She looks surprised when she notices his car, and, glancing at the clock again, he’s pleased to see that she’s early as well.

He leans across the passenger seat to open the door for her, and when she climbs in their faces hover inches from one another for a moment. His blood feels like lava.

“You’re really getting in the way of me using my bus pass,” she says, discernibly trying to cut the tension between them. “That thing was expensive, you know?”

But he ignores her, already leaning forward to press his lips against hers. He only means it to be a ‘hello’ kiss. Truly, he just wants to drive and get her to his apartment as soon as possible, but she kisses back enthusiastically, curling her arms around his neck and letting out a small _hmm._ It’s probably been years since he last made out in a car, and now he’s done it twice in two days. It’s sweet, almost innocent, and it reminds him that she’s a college student—that they’re nearly a decade apart in age.

The kiss ends when she has to pull away to breathe. The sight of her reddened, breathless face makes his pulse quicken. He swears that there’s never been anything on this planet as beautiful as her. Shaking his head slightly, he leans back into his own seat and turns his key in the ignition.

“I love your car,” she says, dazedly. “They really don’t make them like this anymore.”

He laughs. Her interest in cars is endearing. “Can you drive a manual?”

He imagines them in a parking lot, him showing her how to move the stick. The image is appealing for more reasons than one.

“I can, but it’s been a while. How long have you had it?”

“A while. It was a gift.” The flash of his father’s face is easily repressed.

“So you’re cooking for me? An interesting choice for a first date.” The thought of bringing her someplace without _a bed_ was repellant.

“Lasagna. I hope you’re not too hungry, because I’ve yet to put it in the oven.”

“Is it worth waiting for?” She asks, jokingly.

“You’ll have to be the judge of that.” He was hardly a chef, but he could feed himself. Better than going to some overpriced restaurant where the staff are idiots and the food shit. He pauses, weighing his next words on his tongue. “It’s more intimate this way. We can really get to know each other.”

She doesn’t speak for a long moment, and, horrified, he thinks he’s overstepped. His grip on the stick tightens, his knuckles going white. Then, she lets out an amused breath and says, “Sounds perfect. Do you do this for all the girls, or just the ones you meet at art showings?”

She’s joking, but beneath that Kylo detects the smallest hint of ire. He does his best to sound wounded: “Dating isn’t really something I dabble in often.”

He can’t tell if she believes him or not, but she doesn’t ask to be taken home.

“So what’s your job?”

“I’m a waitress at a place just off campus. It’s tough work, but the tips are good at least.” He imagines they are, for someone that looks like her. “I used to work at the CPI bookstore, but this pays better. Also, they let me work more hours.”

He wonders how many hours a week she works. He was in high school the last time he had an hourly job (and it didn’t last for very long). It hadn’t been a necessity in his family, his parents were plenty able to support him, but he was 16 and was desperate to grow up.

“What did you do today?” She asks in the silence.

 _I waited for this._ “I went back to the gallery to talk with those buyers from last night. They bought all of the series. _Cauterize,_ if you remember.”

She’s quiet for a long moment, and there’s a false sort of calm in her voice when she asks, “Did they buy the other one too?”

He remembers how her eyes had flashed, when he asked her about _Untitled_. He asked why she liked it and for just a second she had seemed vulnerable. He says, “No, they weren’t interested.”

It’s a lie. The Richards had asked for it and he refused to sell—Hux looked like he wanted to murder Kylo for cheating him out of the cut he would have gotten for helping to sell a painting of that size.

“Well, congratulations on selling the others.” Her voice is light again, almost relieved.

A handful of minutes later, halfway across Coruscant, he leads her down the hallway to his apartment.

He opens the door for her, and once he’s closed it behind him he practically rushes her, taking hold of her from behind and leaning down to kiss and suck at her neck. She gasps, obviously surprised, but it turns to a moan instantly when he kisses behind her ear. She tastes so good, he can’t stand it, and he can feel her pulse on his tongue.

“Kylo,” she says suddenly, warning. He ignores her, moves his hands under her jacket, gently squeezing her supple waist. “Wait.”

He only stops when he feels her tugging at his arms. He groans, almost a growl, and lets her turn to face him. She’s here, in his space, and he doesn’t want to _wait._

“I want to.” It strikes him that she didn’t actually want him to stop, is restraining herself as much as she’s restraining him. “But let’s wait until after we eat.”

He nods. Truthfully, he’d forgotten about eating, but she is probably hungry after being on her feet for hours at work. Taking deep breaths, counting to ten over and over, he tries to calm himself. But he’s half hard in his jeans—she must have felt it—and the thought of having her, even if the gratification is somewhat delayed, is making it difficult to tamper his arousal. He slides the lasagna into the oven, sets the timer, and turns back towards her. She’s looking around his apartment, not at him. She glances through an open door, his studio, and only then does she turn towards him.

“Can I go in?” He nods, but that familiar feeling of anxiety comes over him. She disappears, and a second later the light turns on. He tries not to sprint when he moves toward the doorway. It isn’t a particularly big studio, but it suits his purposes just fine. There’s enough floor space for when he paces, and the floors are wood, unlike his carpeted living and bedrooms, but he’s laid out a carper over by the bookshelf. The room has a large window that looks out onto the street below. Rey has taken his permission to enter as permission to look over his art and is going through each one he has leaning against the wall, one against another. They’re mostly unfinished paintings, or ones he decided to abandon working on. Some she glances over quickly, but every once in a while she comes to one and pauses for a long time. Just looking, the way she looked at _Untitled_ only yesterday. He wishes he could see more clearly which paintings she was looking at—and her facial expression while she looked.

She turns to look at him, suddenly aware of him watching her, and gently sets all the paintings back against the wall. He half expects her to say something typical, and meaningless, like ‘ _they’re beautiful_ ’, but she doesn’t.

Instead, she asks, “Do you only do abstracts?” Does her tone sound almost accusatory?

He shrugs. “I used to do other things. Landscapes. Portraits.” That was when he was in art school, before he dropped out.

“Not anymore?”

“No. It felt—forced.”

* * *

 

Rey follows Kylo back into the living room. She’d forced herself to take a look at his other paintings, to set her mind at ease, but it hadn’t helped. It had been an effort to convince herself that whatever sensation those paintings in the gallery had inflicted upon her was invented by her stress-ridden mind. Kylo could be intense, true. The look on his face when she turned to see him in the doorway of his studio was alarming, to say the least, and he didn’t exactly seem pleased when she asked him to wait until after dinner. But the terror, still present in the back of her mind, had to be irrational, Kylo isn’t threatening—so why hadn’t it gone away?

They sit on the couch, sharing a bottle of red wine. He asks her about her degree, what she wants to do after she graduates. She notices, not for the first time, how he seems to hang off her every word, like she’s the only person in the world. She’s unused to someone being so focused on her, and it makes her cheeks grow warm, makes her fiddle with her hair. She doesn’t feel shy, but she also doesn’t quite feel comfortable.

The oven dings when they’re dinner is ready, and Kylo tells her to sit when she tries to get up and help. There’s only one stool at the bar in his kitchen, so they sit on the couch. After a glass and a half of wine, Rey finds that she is more at ease. She pulls her legs up under her and sits sideways on the couch so she can face him while he eats. He does the same, giving her a toothy, disarming grin that creates butterflies in her stomach.

The food is actually pretty delicious. Rey doesn’t have a kitchen of her own in her dorm, and her food money is sparse. A typical dinner for her consists of ramen noodles and microwaved frozen vegetables. Cheap and fast, for when she has to study through her meal. She hardly ever eats meat, and it takes an amazing amount of self-control not to ask for seconds. As the meal progresses, Kylo grows increasingly quiet. It isn’t hard for her to figure out why.

“Can I wash the dishes?” She asks, once they’re both finished.

“Leave them,” he says, and plucks her plate out of her lap. He puts the dishes out of the way on the coffee table, and before Rey can second guess herself, she crawls into Kylo’s lap.

The second he sees what she’s doing, he reaches out and pulls her the rest of the way by her hips. Comfortably straddling him, she kisses him on the cheek and murmurs, “Thanks for dinner.”

His mouth is near her neck, and he kisses her just below her jawline. She jumps at the feeling of his teeth, and giggles when she hears him whisper, “ _Sorry,_ ” before kissing her on the lips.

She rests one hand on his shoulder, but brings the other up to hold his cheek while he kisses her. His arms are wrapped tightly around her middle, and his palms are already under the hem of her shirt, pressing against her bare back. He feels good, under her like this, and when she wiggles slightly farther forward she feels that he is hard. Experimentally, she trails a hand down his chest and presses her fingers against his crotch. He groans, _loudly_ , and when Rey looks at his face, his mouth is hanging open, so she kisses him again. Kisses one of the moles on his cheek.

She doesn’t realize that he’s moved his hands until he’s kneading at the space between her parted legs. She’s wearing jeans, but she’s aroused too and the feeling of pressure there makes her choke.

“Let go,” she says. He obeys but his eyes are wide as she scrambles off his lap to stand beside him. In some far away place in her head, she knows she could make this sexier, but instead she shoves her jeans down her legs and leaps back on top of him. The second she’s there, he’s palming at her through her panties, the other hand sliding up and down her bare legs appreciatively.

He curses, “ _fuck_ , _Rey,_ ” and jerks his hips so her thighs are up at his hips, with all her weight resting on his middle. It’s the first time she’s heard him say her name and it makes everything clench. His cock is right below her, separated by a few layers of fabric. A surprised shudder goes through her at the feeling of him there, rubbing every time one of them moves.

“Hold on to me.” He wraps his arms around her again, tighter this time. He repeats himself and she scrambles to move her arms around his neck before he stands, with her safely in his arms. Through the haze, she recognizes the oddity of this—she doubts that she’s been carried more than a handful of times since she learned to walk. He steps through another doorway, not the one to his studio, and it’s dark for a moment before he lets her fall. The squeak she lets out in the split second before she lands on the bed is embarrassing, and he’s grinning at her when he turns on the lamp beside the bed.

Not breaking eye contact with her, he leans down, takes hold of the hem of her shirt, and pulls it up over her head.

“Now you,” she says. She’s in just her bra and underwear now, and he’s still fully dressed. He takes off his black t-shirt, but he leaves his jeans on in favor of leaning down to kiss her so hard she falls back against the covers. Teeth press into her lip so hard it hurts and she forgets to breathe again, pulls away gasping, still holding him close by his hair.

A pained groan escapes his lips and she lets go of his hair, suddenly realizing how hard she must have been pulling. She makes an apologetic sound, but he shakes his head and says, “Don’t stop. Feels good.”

She lets out a shaky breath because _fuck_ his voice sounded good when he said that. He rubs her _hard_ between her thighs, his index finger circling that sensitive ball of nerves through the fabric, and she sees stars.

“God, Kylo—“ But he’s already moving his hands up, pressing them under the cups of her bra until she reaches behind her and unclasps it so he can toss it to the floor. His mouth on her nipples is almost painful, with the shock of sensation the leaps through her veins. “ _Please_.”

And finally, _finally_ , he shoves his jeans and his briefs down his hips, so his cock rests lightly against Rey’s thigh. Her panties follow, and Rey catches his eyes following the way the white fabric slides over her legs. Then, he meets her eyes—she swears, in this light, his irises are almost black and they go on forever—and slides two fingers inside her. It’s been a while so it burns, but she wants this so badly it’s easy to ignore, and he gently thumbs at her clit as he adds a third finger. She’s wet enough that she can hear it when he plunges his fingers in and out—an embarrassing sound that makes her want to hide her face even as Kylo can’t seem to get enough of it.

When he gets up, the cold air is such a shock she whines. He’s rummaging in the drawer beside his bed and pulls out a box of condoms. Then, he’s back over her, and she runs a hand over his cock as he struggles with the wrapper, bucking into her grip. She wants to scream at him when he asks if she’s ready, but she just nods instead.

He pushes into her all at once in a way that should _hurt_ , but he’s still flicking at her clit, still kissing at her neck, so instead it makes her arch and pull him closer.

Then she clenches around him and he goes stiff, eyes tightly shut while he adjusts, his fingers motionless at the space between them. He has her wound so tight already, every second he waits feels like death, so she begs, “ _Don’t stop.”_

He opens his eyes and looks at her, skimming his gaze from her face, over her breasts, all the way down to where they’re joined. Testing, he brushes a finger ghosts against her opening, all the way up to her clit. He barely touched her but she jerks from the pleasure. He finally moves again, hips meeting her thighs with every stroke. His hand is in her hair, holding tight enough that she feels the pull on her scalp, and he’s saying her name, over and over again while he thrusts.

“I’m close,” she tells him, voice shaking. His movements stutter at her words.

He groans, “Fuck. Do it. Come.” The pressure of his fingers on her clit increases, the circles he’s been rubbing there going faster. Then, all the air goes out of her lungs, as every single muscle in her body seizes up. 

* * *

 

When Rey comes, her back arches off the bed, her mouth in an appealing _o_ that Kylo can’t help but press his lips against, even as he thrusts into her. Her voice fills the room, louder than the sound of skin slapping against skin. Her orgasm seems to last for ages, each second accompanied by her squeezing around his cock. She’s so warm inside, it’s dizzying; she’s wiped every thought but her out of his mind. Watching her go boneless in his arms is simultaneously maddening and a relief, like a weight off of his chest.

He wants this to last forever, but he desperately needs to come, needs release, and won’t get it unless he fucks her harder than this. Her eyes are closed, as she comes down from her orgasm, chest still heaving even though the pulses inside her have stopped. He’s slowed down to long, gentle strokes, suddenly feeling as if she is made of glass, and any harsher movement than this will break her. Even so, he remembers the way she’d moaned when he fucked her through her orgasm, each one of his movements making her breath catch in her throat.

Then, Rey cracks her eyes open. They’re glossy, pupils dilated against the light as she squints up at him. She lifts her hand to his cheek and pulls him down for a kiss.

Against his lips, she says, “Finish, Kylo.”

He almost snarls as she wraps her ankles around his waist to push him deeper. Her legs are spread as wide as they can go, but he still wants to go deeper. He takes hold of both of her legs at once and pushes her knees to her chest so she is bent in half, bared. She makes a throaty moan, and it’s one of the sexiest things Kylo has ever heard.

He doesn’t say her name when he comes, but it’s the only word his brain can remember.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Listen](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J82JMZy_9Z0) (Stupid cheesy song perfect for Reylo)
> 
> luvkurai.tumblr.com


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _She finds that she likes the comfort of his weight, the feel of his larger body caging her._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know I said on my tumblr this wasn't coming until tomorrow. But certain people ([t0bemadeofglass](http://archiveofourown.org/users/t0bemadeofglass/pseuds/t0bemadeofglass) ) are really nice and give shout-outs in their amazing, sexy fics that need to be reciprocated ASAP.  
> Enjoy.

Rey dozes in Kylo’s arms for a while. She’s so warm and soft, and he spends most of the time with his nose buried in the hair at the nape of her neck. He memorizes the musky sweetness of her sweat, and beneath that the clean smell of whatever she uses to wash her hair. He presses his mouth to the skin at the top of her spine and sucks until a love bite forms, marking her flesh. He pulls back slightly to look at his work and stares at the red smudge he’s left on her for a long, perfect moment. He wants to litter her skin with them, her breasts and her stomach and her thighs. Intent, he presses his lips to the back of her shoulder. Rey hums and rolls so she’s on her back.

“Stop that,” she says, a playful smile on her face. Her voice is gentle, raspy with exhaustion. Kylo dips and sucks on the sensitive skin on the side of her exposed breast instead. She squirms and weaves her fingers into his hair; she hisses his name and it sounds dirty. When he’s finished, he scatters gentle kisses along her side.

“I should go,” she says, doubtfully. He clenches his teeth and his grip on her waist tightens fractionally. “I need to sleep.”

“You can sleep here,” he says. Then, more forcefully, “Stay the night.”

She lets out a long exhale as she considers, and Kylo doesn’t breathe. He’s racking his brain for another time he felt like this, this calm. It isn’t just that the sex was good. Something about Rey mollifies the noise in his mind, makes his heart beat faster, creates a strange sort of worried nausea in his stomach, all at once.

“Ok,” she finally says, and rolls to face Kylo, giving him a quick kiss. A swell of triumph fills his chest. “But I have class and work tomorrow, so I really do need to sleep.”

“Whatever you want,” he responds, and he means it.

She goes to the bathroom to wash her face (he is almost gleeful when he hears her brushing her teeth, no doubt using his toothbrush). He goes after her, and when he returns to the bedroom he finds her curled up under the covers. The bed is warm, when he joins her, heat radiating around her. Dazed, he thinks that she’s like the sun. Rey falls asleep quickly, having already dozed earlier, and for a long while he just listens to her breathing, feeling her chest rise and fall under his arm.

He can’t seem to find sleep, his mind buzzing with thoughts of the next day and the next week and the next month. The longer he lies there, thinking, the more obtrusive that familiar twitch in his fingers becomes. He looks at the clock on his bedside table, sees that it is only just past 1 AM, and, as gently as he possibly can, unwinds himself from Rey.

In his studio, he turns on the lamp by his desk on and pulls an old sketchbook off his bookshelf. It’s from his second year at the art institute in Hosnian Prime, in the east, before he sold his first paintings and quit. He’d already ripped the old pictures out—they were sketches of people, buildings, trees, when he was forcing himself to try and understand the more classic forms. He picks up the nearest pencil and starts sketching, trying not to think and just _remember_. He remembers the swell of her cheekbones, the jut of her chin, the way the light falls on her neck. Then he tries to draw her mouth, and it all goes to shit. It’s wrong, even the shape of her head is wrong, and suddenly he can’t remember _why_ he’s doing this. He doesn’t know what came over him. Before he can stop himself, he’s ripped the paper to shreds.

He goes back to bed.

* * *

 

Rey wakes to sunlight sweeping through the windows. She can’t remember the last time she woke without an alarm, and it takes a bit of self-control to bask in the indulgence, rather than stressing about the things she should be doing instead. Kylo is still asleep, curled greedily around her body. She finds that she likes the comfort of his weight, the feel of his larger body caging her. She shifts closer and instantly regrets it, as he stirs, cracking his eyes open to peer at her.

“Morning,” she greets him. His only response is to squeeze his eyes shut. _Not a morning person, then._ But he’s smiling and Rey lifts her hand to run her fingers through his hair. “Thanks for letting me stay the night. I had a good time.”

He looks at her, an odd spark in his eyes, and she blushes. When he finally speaks, his voice is gravelly with disuse, and it does things to her. “Let’s take a shower.”

She purses her lips, thinking that he seems to only have one thing on his mind, but then he’s pulling her so her bare chest is against his own, his knee wedging itself between her thighs, and suddenly that’s all she can think about too. He pushes his knee up, only just pressing against her sensitive flesh, but it’s enough. Gasping, she arches her back against him. His erection is pressed against her thigh and she’s amazed at how much this turns her on. Kylo wants her and the proof is flush against her body. In the blinding heat of arousal surging through her, she can’t speak; can only nod in agreement to his suggestion.

In the bathroom, he turns on the spray. Rey gets in, letting her hair get wet while she waits for Kylo. She peers out at him, and watches as he rolls a condom over his cock.

“Oh, god,” she says, and he laughs, hopping in. The shower is a good size, but Kylo is massive, easily crowding her against the wall so he can stand under the spray. She shoves lightly at him and he grins as they playfully fight over who gets to stand under the spray—a fight that ends abruptly when she takes hold of his hair to pull him down into a kiss.

His hands are all over her, bruising her hips and groping at her ass. The bathroom is filling with steam and she’s already dizzy, already gasping as his presses his hand between her legs to rub her clit. She moans, so long and loud that it echoes around the bathroom. Embarrassed, she takes one hand out of Kylo’s hair and bites down _hard_ on one of her fingers. Almost immediately, he pulls it away, pinning it to the wall beside her. She swears there will be bruises later, where he’s gripping her, but he’s experimenting between her legs, seeing what sounds he can coax from her, and she can’t think straight to tell him to loosen his grip. Her knees are shaking, she’s barely upright, and it’s almost a blessing when he finally takes her thighs in hand to lift her up and wrap her legs around him. He’s strong, doesn’t even grunt with the effort of holding her.

Her back presses into the wall as he adjusts her, lowering her so the tip of his cock is pressed against her. He waits for a long moment, and she feels his muscles quivering under her hands, not from strain, but from the need to jerk his hips, to push into her.

“Kylo, Kylo,” she whispers against his ear, and then she’s sliding down the wall and he’s pressing inside and _fuck._ Gravity is working against her and there’s no chance to go slow, no chance to adjust before she’s taken every last bit of him. She pulls his hair so hard it must hurt, but she vaguely remembers him saying he liked it last night. He begins to jerk his hips upwards, aiding the thrusts by lifting her body just to let her slam back down. She can’t control the pace, doesn’t have the leverage to shift more than an inch or two, but it feels good, this position feels good. He can’t touch her clit because he’s holding her, but every thrust brushes that spot deep inside that she’d never been able to find before.

He comes a few minutes later, his teeth pressing into her shoulder so hard there will be marks to show for it—like the love bites he left on her neck and breast. Later, she’ll stand in front of the mirror in her dorm room and she’ll be reminded of him when she looks at them. She’s breathless as he pulls out and sets her down, tossing the condom into the garbage can outside the shower. She’s leaning against the wall, trying desperately to catch her breath, when he turns back around.

“You didn’t come,” he says, and before she can confirm it, he’s kneeling on the floor of the shower, trailing his lips along her thigh. He presses a hand under one of her knees and lifts it up, hooking it over her shoulder. He’s kneeling between her legs, nose already pressed into the tufts of hair growing there, and the image is enough to make her gasp from arousal, covering her mouth again.

“Don’t, I want to hear you,” he scolds. He spreads her legs, pulls her down the wall so he can get at the space between her thighs. The first touch of his tongue against her clit makes her whole body seize-up and _fuck he’s really doing this_. He doesn’t let up, doesn’t let her rest or breathe. Pleasure clouds her brain and makes her see spots, and her fingers grip his scalp—she just can’t seem to keep her hands out of his hair. Soon she’s grinding down, pushing against his face. He slides two fingers into her and thrusts gently, punctuating every movement of his mouth with a push inside her. She’s loose from him fucking her, but the friction, even from just two fingers, is glorious. Her orgasm comes over her all at once, and she would wall over if he wasn’t there holding her up.

“You’re really good at that,” she says numbly, once he’s taken his fingers out of her and is standing. His legs must hurt from kneeling like that—the floor of the shower is not forgiving.

“My pleasure,” he says, and then he kisses her, pressing his tongue into her mouth so she can taste herself.

* * *

 

They wash each other, Kylo having an easier time of it than Rey, who has to stand up on the tips of her toes to properly wash his hair. His veins are full of calm energy after his orgasm, and Rey’s fingers massaging his scalp are like heaven.

When they finish, Rey gets dressed and Kylo pulls on a pair of briefs and heads to the kitchen to make coffee for the two of them. He pours himself a cup just as a phone rings from the living room. It’s not his, it’s Rey’s, and he finds it on the coffee table, buzzing, the screen lit up with a name across it: _Finn._

“Is that mine?” Rey rushes out of the bedroom, dressed except for her jeans, which are on the floor at Kylo’s feet. They’re beside her open book bag—her wallet has fallen out and is on the floor, along with her notebook. Her wet hair is pulled back and her cheeks are still flushed from the hot shower. Kylo pushes down the thought of smashing the phone against the floor and hands it to her. She answers, turning away from him—the sight of her back, leaving, he wants to reach out and turn her around and pin her to the floor.

“Hey,” she says into the phone. Kylo hears a man speaking, a fast jumble that _drips_ amity and friendship. _Maybe more than friends, who knows how many ‘friends’ she has?_ He isn’t used to keeping the anger inside, he needs to break something, or paint, or, at the very least, walk in circles, but instead he sits on the stool in the kitchen and listens.

“I’m not there, you should’ve called first… Ok… Yeah, I can be back in an hour… No problem. Bye.”

_She’s leaving. She’s going to another man. She’s never coming back._

“I have to go back to campus,” she says, pulling on her jeans and glancing around for her coat and purse. “I think there’s a bus stop one block down, right?”

“Let me take you there,” he says. _Please._ He wants to take her back to bed and never let her leave. “It’ll be faster than the bus.”

“I don’t need a chauffer,” she says lightly. She’s already grabbing her bag off the counter. When she comes close to kiss him goodbye on the cheek, he takes hold of her waist and pulls her to the space between his legs. With him sitting, her face is slightly higher. He kisses her lips, wrapping his arms around her so tightly that she can’t move. The name _Finn_ is in his head _and hers_ and he wants to get it out.

“Mmm, Kylo,” she whispers against his lips. He opens his eyes and finds her looking. “I have to go.”

She pries his hands away and slips her coat on. At the door, she turns back to smile at him and says, “Call me.”

Then she’s gone. Kylo doesn’t breath for a moment, trying to listen to her footsteps echoing down the hall. Once he’s sure she’s in the elevator, he picks up his mug of steaming coffee and throws it against the wall with a shout of rage.

It shatters, coffee painting the white wall brown.

He sits completely still for a moment, staring at the coffee dripping down the wall onto the floor. Fury pulses through his veins and destroying the cup has done nothing to dissipate it. Left with nothing in his immediate vicinity to destroy, he stands and circles the room. Peering down at the couch, he remembers how she’d climbed into his lap, pressed her lips against his skin.

Then, his eyes drop to the floor, where a silver key is lying on the carpet. It’s not his, and he remembers how Rey’s bag had been there, open with items nearly falling out. He stoops to pick it up, feeling the cold weight of it in his hand.

Rey wouldn’t have gotten too far, he could call her back to get it— _she would be grateful._ Or he could drive to the campus and give it to her there, see who this _Finn_ person is.

He does neither.

* * *

 

Rey meets Finn and Poe in the entrance hall of her building. They’re deep in conversation when she arrives, and she almost feels like she’s intruding when she walks up to them. They aren’t dating—or, if they are, they haven’t told her—but Rey figures it’s just a matter of time. Poe is openly gay, and Rey has a drunken memory of Finn kissing some faceless male comp-sci student at a party in their first year, before they met Poe.

“Where were you?” Finn asks good-naturedly.

“I spent the night at a friend’s.” She hesitated before speaking, and that’s all they need to hear.

“What _friend_?” Poe’s grinning ear to ear and she pinches him on the arm hard enough that he yelps.

“ _Fuck_ , there’s a hickey on the back of your _neck!_ ”

“Oh my god, guys, did you get me to come back here just to gossip about my love life or do you want to look at my notes?” She acts more embarrassed than she is—in reality she would likely have told them about Kylo at some point today anyways.

“Last time I checked you didn’t _have_ a love life, so this is kind of big news,” Finn says. “But, yeah, notes would be good.”

They walk to the lecture hall together, Rey having resolved to not change her clothes until after the lecture. Finn skims Rey’s notebook while Poe pushes her hair aside to look at the mark Kylo left on her, just visible above the collar of her coat. Rey doesn’t dare tell him about the other one on the side of her breast, and she certainly doesn’t speak of the bruises she can feel blooming on her hips and ass.

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me you were seeing someone,” Finn says, and to Rey’s surprise there is a tinge of genuine hurt in his tone.

She rushes to assure him, “I mean, it isn’t like I’m really seeing him... We only met on Wednesday—“

“At that art thing?” Poe interjects. “How old is this guy?”

He’s imaging some 80-year-old man and forgetting the fact that Rey is 21 and was at the gallery too. “I’m not sure. Older than us. Maybe 30.” Kylo has the type of face that can look weathered one moment, and youthful the next. “He’s an artist.”

“Rey, I’ve never seen this side of you. Who knew you were such a groupie?”

“Quiet, you.” She bumps her shoulder against Poe’s.

“What’s he like?” Finn asks, snapping her notebook shut in favor of listening.

Rey doesn’t quite know how to answer that. Kylo is severe and sweet all at once, needy and aloof, selfish and generous. _Generous_ —she remembers how his eyes had burned when he buried his face between her legs in the shower, not even two hours ago. The man is a walking contradiction.

“He’s interesting,” Rey finally says, a bit dully.

“You’ve gotta give us more than that. What’s his name?”

“Kylo Ren.”

“Weird name. Maybe it’s fake. Do artists have, like, pseudonyms?” Finn wonders aloud. “You should Google him.”

She should have thought to do that earlier, but she hadn’t exactly had time in the 36 hours or so since she met him. _Has it really only been that long?_

“Was he good?” Poe asks, nudging her with his elbow. Finn makes a choking sound at their friend’s forwardness and then bursts out laughing. Rey shoots him a glare.

“It’s not like I have a ton to compare him to, but yeah he was pretty good.” She tries to punch Poe when he waggles his eyebrows at her and he moves to hide behind Finn.

“Do you have plans to see him again or was it a one-night-stand?” Finn asks. It strikes Rey that Poe and Finn have no clue how she would handle a relationship, casual or otherwise, and they’re a bit worried about her. She thinks of the look on his face when she was leaving, how hard it was to push his hands away so she could get out the door. She still has the agonizing feeling that she doesn’t quite know what Kylo Ren wants from her; the truth is, Rey doesn’t quite know what _she wants_ from him either.

In the end, she lets Finn’s question hang.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> luvkurai.tumblr.com


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _For a moment he circles the room, feeling like a caged animal._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for your kind words, your kudos, and your patience as I struggle to pull my life together. It really means a lot. :)  
> A note on this chapter: at the last second I decided to change the way it was split between the next chapter. Due to this, it is a bit shorter. However, the next chapter will be a whopping 5k+, so that's something to look forward to.  
> The tagline for this chapter is the same as the tagline for Kylo Ren: _Well, that escalated quickly._

The stiff hinges of the door creak as it opens and Kylo feels like he’s opened a tomb. Rey’s dorm room is pitch-black and blessedly empty, the drapes pulled shut to keep out the light and the gaze of anyone living in the next building over. He leaves them shut and flips the light switch on, letting the door slam shut behind him.

He parked his car off the CPI campus, aware that Rey would immediately recognize it if he were to leave it anywhere near her building. He sat in his vehicle, chain-smoking for around an hour, trying to decide whether or not he should cross this line. Finally, he dropped his fifth cigarette and stalked onto the campus, quickly navigating the maze of sidewalks to Rey’s building. There was a scanner for student IDs on the door—easily bypassed by catching the door as a group of students passed through—and a CCTV camera positioned in the entrance hall, but otherwise the security in the building was abysmal. In the middle of the day, hardly anyone was around, scurrying between their rooms and the communal bathrooms to see him searching. It’s lucky, as is obviously far too old to be a student. He spent an annoying amount of time walking the halls until he found a room with her name on it, _Rey,_ written out on piece of paper and taped to the door—most likely not by her hand.

The first thing he does, once safely inside the room, is bend to place the key in his hand conspicuously on the carpet in front of the door, so Rey will see it the moment she walks in. Then, he straightens up and looks around.

The room is a closet, by most standards. It is a third of the size of the dorm room he was allotted _at most_. He would not fit on the single bed if he tried, and the desk looks on the verge of collapse under the weight of Rey’s textbooks and notebooks. He brushes his fingers over the one on top— _Engineering Fluid Dynamics._ It’s a secondhand copy, as are all the ones beneath it, the cardboard covers frayed at the edges. He looks at the walls next. They’re mostly bare, which is strange, if he remembers what the rooms of the girls from his university days looked like. There’s a few cards taped up, nondescript holiday cards that, when he flips one open, say impersonal things like ‘Have a great vacation, Rey!’ There are no posters, just one picture of Rey wedged between two men around the same age as her. He forces himself not to glare at the photo for too long, not to think about whether or not one of them is _Finn._ In the corner her bed is wedged in, she has taped up a few advertisements for galleries.

He places one knee on her bed to lean forward and get a better look at them. The mattress is stiff and he wonders how she manages to get a wink of sleep—if she sleeps in this bed at all, or in someone else’s. He tries to tamper his ire, but it multiples tenfold when he recognizes one of the paintings featured on a leaflet for Coruscant Museum of Fine Art as one of his mother’s. It’s a landscape, some lake that Kylo vaguely remembers from a family vacation when he was a child. It’s so clear, the fog dissipating away under the rising sun, the smooth water shining green. It pounds at his skull like a memory. He takes hold of it to get a better look, pulls too hard and rips it down. He curses under his breath, fumbling to try to place it back on the wall, but the whole leaflet is ripped in two, straight across the print of Leia Organa’s painting. He drops it, as if he’s been burned, and lets the pieces lay there on the mattress, as if the page somehow could have ripped itself in half.

For a moment he circles the room, feeling like a caged animal.

He doesn’t know what he expected, coming here. He remembers when she left, remembers wondering if she was sleeping with someone else, toying with him. Nothing in this room tells him one way or the other—the room is like a shell he can’t seem to crack, but so desperately wants to see inside. All at once, he’s desperate. He wants to know her, wants to know everything about her, but every word she says, everything she does makes him feel as if he’s farther from the truth of her, that big, all-encompassing _thing_ seated firmly at her center.

He opens her closet next, doesn’t touch anything, and just skims his eyes over the neatly folded items. After only a few seconds he slams the doors shut, perhaps too vehemently, as the entire room seems to quiver for a moment, although that could just be him. He sits at her desk, clutching the edge as he inhales deeply. He shifts in the too-small chair and thinks that the room _does_ smell like her—that comforting scent he remembers from her hair. He remembers rubbing his own shampoo into her scalp this morning and imagines how they must smell the same, now.

Something in his peripheral vision catches his gaze, making him turn in his chair and bend to peer into the trash bin beside her desk. Gingerly, he takes hold of a piece of paper near the top and places it on the desk. It’s a scrap of notebook paper. One side is littered with equations, some crossed out, others not. On the back is a sketch, messily done with the telltale sharpness of mechanical pencil. The lines twist and curl, going severe in some places and smooth in others as the image of a single hand becomes clear. It’s gripping something—a pole, maybe? He can’t tell, the sketch disperses into nothingness almost the moment the hand ends.

It’s good. Not amazing—the artist obviously didn’t spend a massive amount of time on it, and it lacks the distinct method that comes with a more classical education. But it’s clear, and there’s something emotional about the way the hand is poised, tense, and the jagged way the lines go beyond the actual form of the hand.

A strange sort of anxiety grips at him the longer he looks at the sketch, because he knows immediately that no one but Rey could have drawn it and _why didn’t she tell me about this?_

Throwing caution to the wind, he begins to tear through the drawers of her desk, attempting only half-heartedly to ensure that the items are replaced in relatively the same positions he finds them. There’s nothing—more textbooks, pencils, and empty notebooks. The stray test or exam, quickly shoved out of the way. He knows he never asked, but she _hid this_ from him, she kept it secret, and now he can’t even find further proof of it.

He looks under the textbooks on her desk, returns to the wardrobe and lifts each stack of clothes to search behind them. He remembers that he found this sketch in the trash of all places, as if she couldn’t care less—and he wonders if there truly is nothing to be found in the entire expanse of her bedroom.

Then, he searches the bedside table, and from the drawer he pulls a small blue notebook of unlined paper.

The book is only half full, and the last one is dated almost three years earlier, but he looks at every single sketch, running his fingers over the pencil lines, as if touching it could somehow help him understand what it is he sees.

As if this alone could somehow make him know her.

* * *

 

Rey exhales deeply as she finally sits at one of the library’s computers. As well as the day had started off—that shower seems weeks ago, now—it went south pretty quickly. The three-hour lecture was long and exhausting and she was on the verge of falling asleep on Poe’s shoulder the entire time. Then, she went back to the dorm and realized that she’d lost her key. She called security and all but _begged_ them to come unlock her door—she had work in an hour and didn’t have time for this. She’d luckily found her key on the floor of her room and gotten to work just on time, but it added unneeded stress to her day. Her shift didn’t end until 10:30, and now here she was at 11, wanting nothing more than to sleep, but with a paper due Monday that she hasn’t even started on in addition to the test later in the week.

She rolls her shoulders. It’s a Friday night and Finn and Poe have opted to go out, as they don’t have a paper to work on. She wishes she could join them, but the last two day’s activities took up more time than expected. Glancing around the library, it appears she’s the only one in the building other than an angry-looking research assistant sitting behind the front desk.

Her phone buzzes and she glances at it expectantly, but it’s just a text from Poe—a picture of Finn grinning as he’s about to take a shot of something. Another message comes seconds later, beseeching her again to come meet them, but she politely declines, citing all the work she has to get done. She shouldn’t expect a text message from Kylo so quickly. She saw him only this morning after all. She remembers Poe’s advice that she Google him, and deciding to procrastinate for just a moment longer, she types ‘Kylo Ren’ into the search engine. She has work to do and shouldn’t be wasting her time with this; she’s being _obsessive._

Quite a few results come up, including images of a few of his paintings that apparently sold for quite a bit a few years prior. She glances over them, refusing to look too closely, and goes from link to link before selecting an article from _Coruscant Art & Culture’_s website.

The headline reads: _KYLO REN and the Meaning of SAVAGE_

It’s a review of a group of his paintings shown in a gallery a few months ago—a popular one on the other side of the city that does openings by invitation only. It focuses on one of his paintings, _Savage._ There’s a picture of it at the top of the page, and Rey clicks on it and allows herself a few seconds to take it in. Judging by the picture of it, it’s a bit smaller than _Untitled_. More gray than anything, it could be mistaken for a dilapidated city scape or a flooded field, seen from above, but Rey looks at it and sees the storm clouds, the dark fog and the vicious energy pounding beneath it, with a living pulse. It’s angry and lonely and terrifying. It’s a nightmare from another time, in another place.

She forces herself to look away and skims the article:

_His name is, of course, not Kylo Ren. Born Ben Solo, the artist is the son of Coruscant’s own Leia Organa, whose paintings we were lucky enough to experience at the Museum of Fine Art earlier this year. When I questioned his pseudonym he remained silent for a full minute before claiming that he wanted to ‘forge his own path’. Such a feat could certainly have been accomplished without changing one’s identity, but he insisted that it was necessary._

_Ren’s style is resonant of the chaotic energy of some of the neo-expressionists, but with less form and symbolism and more raw emotion. His work is sure to strike a cord in even the most level-minded. Of the painting at the forefront of the gallery’s exhibition,_ Savage, _he commented on the ‘universal dream’ of walking along a colorless, barren landscape, of isolation save for the frightening energy found within._

_‘Unhinged’ may perhaps seem too strong a word to apply to an individual after conversing for only a few minutes, but if Ren’s emotional state is not made clear in the first seconds of interaction with him, it is certainly explicit in his work._

Rey stops reading, feeling a strange sort of unease, as if she has betrayed Kylo by reading the article. The journalist called him _unhinged_ , a slight against him that rattles her bones, as if she herself has been insulted.

_Ben Solo._ She reads the name again and again, memorizing it as if she could forget it the moment she looks away. As much as she dislikes what the writer said about him, she feels as if she has unlocked something hidden about Kylo, a secret that he may never have told her.

Rey works on her paper for two more hours before trudging back to her dorm. Her room feels ice cold when she arrives, and she crawls into bed fully dressed.

For a time she dreams of lying in another bed, in another’s arms, warm and wanted and safe. Then, the bed is empty, and then she is not in a bed at all, but wandering a gray landscape, a colorless version of the desert. To her left, she hears a car engine and turns, seeing the outline of the truck just as it disappears into the mist. The red taillights glow through the gray for a long time before disappearing altogether, like a candle extinguished. She yells for someone, anyone, to come back for her, but even as she screams she knows that no one will answer.

In the middle of the night she wakes, sweating, with echoes of hunger in her stomach, and the ghost of tears at the corner of her eyes.

* * *

 

Kylo Ren does not leave his apartment for three days. He does not sleep; save for small bursts on the floor of his studio when he can no longer keep his eyes open or his fingers cannot stop shaking. He barely eats, dipping into canned vegetables and soup he bought years ago because he refuses to go to the grocery store. All day he sits at his desk, trying desperately to get it right. He gives up at more than one point, slamming his fists into walls and breaking a number of plates. His kitchen cannot be navigated without shoes because he has not cleaned away any of the mess, and he has already stepped on a few pieces of glass. At one point, he turns on his stove and watches the flame rise, then holds the sketchbook out in front of it. The corner burns and he only barely comes to his senses to put it out before the entire thing is destroyed.

By the time he comes to his senses, it is Monday afternoon and his phone has been dead since Saturday morning. He plugs it in and watches as it powers up, as missed messages appear on the screen. He receives one voicemail from a gallery owner, another from a fellow artist, congratulating him on last week’s showing. There is a single missed call from Rey, from Saturday evening, with no message left behind.

He stares at his phone for a long while as he decides what to do. Surely there would be a voicemail or a text message if she knew he had been in her room. Surely she would have come to her senses about him and called the police. He begins to clean as he considers; first himself, taking the longest shower of his life to wash the smears of black on his hands and arms, built up over three days, then the kitchen, then the disarray of papers that currently make up his studio. It had been years since he’d done something like this, retreated so fully into his work. Usually he comes out of it with a few pieces worth a damn, but this time there’s nothing—nothing he would dare show to anyone on the planet. He barely wants to look at them himself, places the pile in the empty lower drawer of his desk and swears he would rather push the whole desk out the window than open it again.

Cold air rushes in around him when he opens the window of the studio. For a second he glares down at the street below, watching as people scurry by in their winter coats, then he lights a cigarette. He isn’t technically allowed to smoke in the apartment, is meant to go outside or to the roof, but in the four years he’s been living here, he’s never once followed that rule. His landlord probably even suspects him of doing it from the amount of times the fire alarm has gone off—although Kylo’s _smoking_ has never been the activity that set it off. He exhales smoke into the winter outside and taps the ashes onto the windowsill before brushing them away.

Glancing at the clock on the wall, he wonders what Rey is doing at this moment.

He’s come to his senses, somewhat, about whomever Finn is. Part of him is still convinced that she is sleeping with someone else, that Kylo is one of many, but the saner voice in his head is aware that he has known Rey for less than a week. He can’t expect to be her sole focus every second of every day. _Even if she is for me._ He can count the wakeful minutes since Wednesday that weren’t focused on _Rey_ on his fingers, for fuck’s sake. He’s almost resentful of her. For bursts of seconds, he wants to find her and shake her and _demand_ to know what she did to him to make him feel this way.

He isn’t so out of his mind that he truly faults her—he knows that this is all him. But that somehow makes it worse, makes him more desperate, less rational.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> luvkurai.tumblr.com


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _She imagines the darkness submerging her. She imagines Kylo pulling her down into it._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi there. :)

Rey sees his car before she sees him. It sticks out like a sore thumb on the campus—too rare for even the richest students—and a few younger students that live in her dorm are peering at it through the glass doors. Kylo is sitting on the hood, looking at his phone, glancing at the doors to her building every once in a while; he hasn’t seen her yet. She thinks about telling Finn and Poe, who are walking on either side of her, that she left something at the lecture hall. The thought, that she avoid Kylo, catches her by surprise.

But it’s too late—Kylo has seen her and is standing now. He’s wearing his black winter coat and jeans, but it’s freezing outside and who knows how long he’s been waiting there for her. It’s Monday and Rey could have been working or had plans already. _Why didn’t he just call?_

“Rey,” he calls, as if to catch her attention, as if she isn’t already looking right at him. She waves, then holds up a single finger, motioning for him to wait.

“That’s Kylo,” she mutters to her friends, before they can ask. “I’ll see you guys at the library later?”

“You aren’t going to introduce us?” Finn asks, genuinely hurt.

Poe snorts. “Forget the library. You’ve got better options than keeping us from flunking out.”

She gives Poe a tight shake of her head before striding towards the TIE. Kylo is sitting again and he doesn’t get up when she approaches.

“Hi,” she says, not bothering to keep the surprise out of her tone. “What are you doing here?”

“Just thought I’d drop by,” he says, voice quiet. He looks over her head, obviously watching her friends walk away. When he looks back, his eyes are slightly narrowed and Rey notices him searching her face, trying to gauge her reaction to him being here, waiting in front of her building. She gets the feeling that he’s expecting her to be upset. She feels a pang of annoyance—true, she called him two days ago, but this isn’t high school, she can handle being patient. This is what she tells herself, but the reality is a bit different. She remembers staring at her phone for hours on Saturday night, waking up excitedly the next morning excepting a text or _something._ During her shift on Sunday she took twice as many breaks as usual, just so she could check her phone.

Silently, she takes his hand in hers and lets their fingers weave together. Her heart skips a beat when he runs the nail on his thumb gently over her palm.

There’s a faint smile on his face now, which she reciprocates, and he says, “Let’s go for a drive.”

“Why?”

“You don’t want to? What if I let you drive?” He’s peering into her eyes, seeing if this will have the desired effect on her, and keeping her face from lighting up at the thought makes the muscles in her cheeks ache.

She lifts an eyebrow at him, peering at the TIE and imagining what it would look like if she wraps it around a tree. She likes to think that she’s a pretty good driver; she’s never been in an accident before, but it isn’t as if she’s had many opportunities to do so. The last time she drove a car was in Jakku, and traffic there is nonexistent in comparison to that of Coruscant.

“What if I get us out of the city, and you can drive from there?” He says, as if reading her mind. She does want to drive it. It’s a gorgeous car, and she could tell from the two times she’d been in it that its engine is no joke. And she’s just turned in that blasted paper—she _deserves_ this.   
“Ok. Let’s go for a drive.”

He grins, lopsided and bright. He gives her hand a final squeeze before circling to the passenger’s side to open her door. Before she gets into the car, she goes to the tips of her toes and pulls him down to skim her lips across his, just for a millisecond, just because the desire to do so had been gnawing at the back of her mind over the entirety of their conversation. He looks surprised at the action and she silently thrills at how he stands dumbstruck beside the open door for a few seconds after she sits.

The car is chilly and smells vaguely of cigarettes. It makes her wrinkle her nose in distaste, but she doesn’t say anything when he gets in. The engine roars to life and Kylo steers them out of the campus.

“What have you been doing?” _What had you so busy that you couldn’t call me back?_

“Working,” he grunts. Then, he glances at her and smiles, briefly removing his hand from the stick to run his fingertips over her knee. She wants to punch herself, for how much the small touch affects her. “You missed me?”

_Yes._ “Maybe a little bit.”

“I only saw your call a few hours ago. My phone was dead all weekend. I wanted to see you.”

“You should have called first. You’re lucky that I’m not working tonight.”

He pauses and, when she looks at him, his hands look like they’re attempting to knead the steering wheel. He seems annoyed, but when he finally does speak he doesn’t sound it: “I wanted to surprise you.”

Although she doesn’t call him out on it, she’s almost certain that he came to her campus to catch her off guard, as if suspecting her of hiding something from him. But she doesn’t know what he could be so concerned about, doesn’t know what motive he would have to spy on her.

* * *

 

Kylo takes the highway south of the city. He likes to go on drives to clear his head sometimes and knows exactly where he wants to take Rey. The skyscrapers of Coruscant thin away slowly to low-rise apartment complexes, expensive suburban neighborhoods, and finally the far-off, decrepit outlet malls that mark the city limits. Past that, it’s tiny enclaves of homes, trailer parks, and long, straight highways, fanning out in every direction. Kylo pulls into the parking lot of a boarded up building so they can switch seats. As they pass one another in front of his car, he stops her with a firm hand on her shoulder. His fingertips graze the top of her neck, just visible above the collar of her coat, up along her jawline. Her cheeks are flushed and he likes to think it’s from more than just the cold.

They kiss for a moment, long enough for Kylo to taste her, long enough for Rey to be panting for air by the time they pull away. _Payback._ Her knees are wobbly and she looks a bit dazed. He raises an eyebrow at her as she tries to pull herself together.

“Maybe I don’t want you driving my car,” he says, deadpan. She calls his bluff and pouts jokingly until he hands her the keys. A flirtatious glint in her eye, she leans up to kiss him on the cheek.

“I promise only to only speed _a little,_ ” she says, and winks at him. She steps around him and for a second he’s reeling with how much he wants to strip off her clothes until she’s bare to the winter air and anyone who happens to drive by, to fuck her against the hood of his car.

Back in the TIE, he feels a jarring sense of confusion at being in the passenger’s seat. He hasn’t let anyone drive his car in years and it’s a bit disconcerting. He’s calmed, however, by the look of Rey, carefully adjusting the seat and the mirrors to her height before pressing the key into the ignition. Her eyes fall shut for a fraction of a second, in appreciation, when the car roars to life, but then she’s shifting gears and peeling out of the parking lot, onto the empty road.

She is a good driver, and Kylo never would have guessed that it had been a while since she’d been behind the wheel if she hadn’t said anything. The clutch on the TIE is old and a bit tough to handle (he’s been meaning to have someone take a look at it), but she doesn’t stall once.

She asks a few questions about the car, how many miles it had on it when he first got it, what major repairs he’s had to get done, but they mostly drive in silence. She’s obviously enjoying herself and Kylo understands the introspective appeal of driving aimlessly like this. Kylo doesn’t bother to give her directions; he almost wishes that they could get lost. There is no traffic out here, away from the city and off the main highway. They sometimes go a full mile without seeing another vehicle on the road. It’s just the two of them, and he allows himself the fantasy that he has her all to himself. The sun starts to set, the yellow-orange light glaring through his window to illuminate Rey. She’s gorgeous, her endearingly unkempt hair forming a halo around her face, her eyes sparkling when she flicks her gaze briefly over to him, a slight smile tugging at her lips. He reaches over and touches his index finger and thumb to a few strands of stray hair. Tucking them behind her ear, he skims his fingers down the side of her neck and withdraws his hand. Outside it is freezing, but it is warm in the car, and Kylo begins to feel a bit overheated. He is strangely anxious at being confined to the car.

“Are you hungry?” He asks her. Kylo desperately needs to get out of the car, needs to breath fresh air and maybe have a quick cigarette. He wonders if Rey smokes—he doubts it, but he likes the thought of him lighting one for her, or maybe him giving her a drag of his own. She shakes her head. It’s dark now, and there aren’t streetlights like there are in the city, he can barely make out her facial expression, but he feels almost instinctively that she’s thinking something over. The quiet drags on for a long time. It isn’t exactly uncomfortable, but his mind is going a mile a minute, trying to pick apart the tiniest measures of her body language.

Her voice comes through the silence: “Why did you change your name?”

* * *

 

Kylo is quiet, and it takes all of her self-control to stop herself from making a sorry attempt at backtracking, from turning to look at him, from apologizing, from pleading with him not to be upset.

She hadn’t planned on asking about this. The question came as a snap decision, spurred by the need to understand just a _fraction_ of what’s going on in his head. There’s a part of her that is tired of walking on eggshells around him, tired of being irrationally worried about how he’ll react. Furthermore, the man really doesn’t talk much, and when he does it tends to be to prompt _her_ to talk more.

“How do you know about that?” He asks finally.

“I googled you.” She prays that it’s common knowledge that he changed his name. Perhaps a bit irrationally, she doesn’t want him to know that she read _that article._

“My mother was an artist,” he says slowly. His use of the past tense catches her by surprise. Rey knows for a fact that Leia Organa is still alive, that she put out a series of portraits only last year. “My father was a collector. A well-known one—within the art community.”

He’s not looking at her, is staring out the windshield as if there’s something out there other than darkness.

“I left town for university, to Hosnian Prime, but it didn’t make a difference. Everyone knew me by my name, everyone compared me to _them_ —like I was just an extension of their _bullshit legacy_.”

His voice goes harsh on the last two words, anger obvious in every part of his body language. She looks over for just a second, out of the corner of her eyes, and looks at the grip of his hands on the fabric of his pants. She looks away as his head jerks toward her face and he speaks again as if all the tension has gone out of his body.

“Art was worth shit to them. My mother sold her work as if it all meant nothing to her and my father took all the profit of other people’s hard work—I couldn’t be a part of that.” He pauses. Rey thinks, a bit judgmentally, of how Kylo has now _twice_ derided the culture of selling one’s work, when he himself successfully sold a series of paintings the first night she met him. It’s rather hypocritical, how he seems infatuated with _purity_ of intention when creating. Even he must see how unfeasible it is in practice.

Kylo says gently, with a tone of rationale that could only have developed over years and years of consideration, “Names are important. They define us. ‘Ben Solo’ was a weak, inept puppet. He couldn’t express himself if his life depended on it. He couldn’t do what he _needed to do_. He couldn’t take what he wanted. His entire life was defined by the shadow he lived under, by who he was related to.”

Rey wonders how many years it took to train himself to refer to ‘Ben Solo’ in the third person, as if they are not and never were the same person. She wonders if he ever said this to the family he cast aside. She wonders how they must have felt, to hear such resentment in his voice.

Maybe that’s why this is so important to her.

Rey pulls over onto the side of the road. She doesn’t turn the car off and doesn’t move her hands from the steering wheel after shifting gears. She’s waiting for him to go on and is stubbornly refusing to push him in any direction. Part of her can’t shake the specific feeling of irritation—that he had a family and would throw them away so effortlessly. And she knows subliminally that he has, from the way he speaks about his parents, and from that article she read about him, about _Savage_. She would have given anything to have such a thing, growing up. Familiar faces, a place to call home, to occupy a place in someone’s life that didn’t feel so relentlessly, agonizingly _temporary._

But what she had, instead, was the poisonous emotions, the never-ending hunger, and the bruises.

What she had, instead, was the loneliness.

She feels guilty for placing so much blame on Kylo. She doesn’t know the full story—the scraps of information he has given her leave much to be desired. Still, it seems like such an impassioned overreaction to the issue of _clashing outlooks on the art industry._

It is difficult for Rey not to imagine Kylo’s parents, as well. How long had it been since they heard their son’s voice, saw his face in person, rather than the pictures in the papers, in which he may as well have been wearing a mask? A pang of hurt tugs at her heart for a moment, in empathy, and it is so familiar it makes her eyes burn.

“I don’t want you to think I was keeping this from you,” he says. Kylo— _or whoever he is_ —turns to her, finally. “This is who I am. You don’t need to worry about Ben Solo.”

How could she _not_ worry about Ben Solo?

Instead, she says, “Of course not. I didn’t want to put you on the spot or anything I just—“ She cuts herself off and peels her hand off the steering wheel (her palms are sticky with sweat) to gesture vaguely. The car is silent for a moment. Rey considers turning on the radio.

_I should tell him._ The thought is intrusive, as right as it may be. Regardless of the reasons he gave, and how she may disagree with them, he has opened up to her. It is only fair that she do the same. And besides, amidst whatever it was that was growing between them, it makes sense that she tell him early on.

* * *

 

“I grew up in the foster system.”

The words are emotionless, and it takes Kylo a moment to wrap his head around them. He turns to face her fully, as much as possible in the car, and stares at her. He doesn’t know what has brought this on. Rey sighs, almost imperceptibly, before she continues.

“I was left in a town in Jakku called Niima. I can’t remember anything from before that. They left me at a gas station with nothing—just the clothes I was wearing and my first name. I don’t even have a last name—just the one that the state gave me for administrative purposes, I don’t like to use it—I couldn’t remember it, when the people at the police station asked.”

And then, all at once, he understands why she has chosen this moment to tell him this. He went on and on about how _names are important_ and _what they say about us_ , and he wants to step in front of a train, he’s so _stupid._ Because if names are so important, then what does that say about Rey, who barely has one at all? She forged a path despite everything; she’s bringing herself out of poverty. And what does it say about Kylo, that he had to change his name to find his way, to find himself, but Rey could do it with half of one? He realizes with a nauseating sort of shock how different they are, the two of them. How different their lives have been.

“How old were you?”

“Six or seven? There’s no way to know for sure, they couldn’t find any documentation of me. It’s like that, in parts of the Western Reaches and the Outer Rim. People can slip through the cracks.

_People,_ though. _Not children. Not girls that are like starlight._

“After it was obvious that no one was coming to claim me and I was put in the foster system, the state gave me an age and a birthday along with the last name.”

_She doesn’t even know for sure how old she is._

Kylo sees flashes of a little girl trying to understand why her schoolmates each get presents and cake one day a year, but she doesn’t. He sees Rey attempting to explain to every friend she’s ever had that she doesn’t have a birthday. He sees a social worker packing belongings into a tiny suitcase and ushering Rey from one life to another. He sees a little girl sitting on the curb in the middle of the night in Jakku—and he sees her notebook, tucked into the bedside table of her dorm room.

Shaking the final image from his mind, Kylo stretches his arm toward Rey and gently turns her face toward him. Her face is clear. There are no tears in her eyes, and Kylo is sure he is not the first one to have been gifted with this information. He is surprisingly not upset at this knowledge, not perturbed that another would know this about her, this story that seems almost like a secret, close and intimate and absolutely _vital_ to who Rey is—yet utterly irrelevant. He is too blown away at having been gifted this information in the first place.

Internally, he reels for a moment. He remembers going through her room, searching her desk and her closet and her _garbage can_ , and while he certainly learned some important things about her then, he knows that he has learned more about Rey just by talking to her. He is guilty, and silently vows not to act so brashly again. It was a disservice to the glorious creature sitting in the driver’s seat of his car, licking her lips and practically begging with her eyes _to do it already._

He kisses Rey slowly this time, savoring the taste of her hot breath on his tongue. She is tense when he first wraps his arms around her middle, but she relaxes quickly, leaning forward to all but sink into him.

The self-reproach twanging at the back of his head, like the start of a headache, dissipates when her fingers find their way into his hair and pull and _fuck how does that feel so good._ But then she pulls away, gasping, and lets her head fall back against the headrest.

For the first time in the admittedly short time Kylo has known her, she looks exhausted. A mix of the conversation and her work and her studies has taken its toll. Her eyelids are heavy as she stares at him, so unbearably attractive it takes everything in him not to kiss her again. Instead, he presses his fingertips to the back of her head and massages her scalp, slow and steady. A tiny moan rumbles in her chest—the sound is as close to a purr as a human can get.

“Let me drive us back to the city,” he says. She nods and unbuckles herself so they can trade seats once more. Once seated in the driver’s seat, Kylo does a U-turn and goes toward where he is relatively sure the highway is. It takes only two minutes for Rey to fall asleep beside him, chest rising and falling slowly. Kylo legitimately feels as if he is in danger of crashing the car, he can’t stop looking over at her. Her face is mostly in darkness, but the amount of light increases as they enter the city, and soon Kylo can make out how her mouth hangs slightly open, how her eyelids quiver slightly in her sleep.

He knows she’s expecting him to bring her back to the campus, knows she probably has classes or work or a study session planned for the morning, but he drives to his own apartment instead. Once he’s parked, he quietly gets out of the car and circles to the passengers side. Rey is still asleep, and Kylo looks down at her for just a moment before reaching over her to unbuckle the seat belt. Then, he presses one arm beneath her legs, another behind her back, and lifts her carefully, _carefully_ out of the car.

He’s amazed that she hasn’t woken up yet, vaguely wonders if he should say something, maybe whisper in her ear, maybe suck on her neck until it _hurts_. Instead he carries her into the building, into the elevator, and down the hall to his apartment. She stirs only when he jostles her while attempting the impossible task of reaching into his pocket for his key—difficult to do while still keeping Rey in his arms. She jerks awake, confused for a second about where she is, before realizing that Kylo is carrying her.

“Where are we?” She says, momentarily disgruntled, worried.

“I didn’t want to wake you,” he tells her. “We’re at my apartment. You can sleep here tonight.”

_You can sleep here every night._

She glances at the front door and whispers, just as Kylo expected, “I have class at nine.”

He kisses her briefly on the mouth, solely because she looks too beautiful like this, barely awake, in his arms. Then he says, “I’ll drive you. Hold onto me so I can open the door.”

And she does, wraps her arms around his neck, and as soon as they’re across the threshold, with Kylo’s arm under her back again, she squeezes her eyes shut and presses her face to his neck.

She asks, voice slightly muffled, “Do I even weigh _anything_ to you?” He laughs and carries her to the bedroom, bends to gently place her on the bed. She sits up, rubbing at her eyes as she peers at him.

“Sorry I fell asleep.” Her voice is small and breathy. But from the way she’s swaying, the way she can’t seem to keep her eyes open, that’s all she wants to do right now. Kylo couldn’t deny her anything.

“Shh…” He hushes her and begins working at the buttons of her coat so he can push it off her shoulders and drop it onto the floor. He presses at her shoulders so she lies back on the bed and he can remove her shoes, her socks. Her feet are warm in his hands and he lightly kisses the arch of one—his heart skips a beat at the little shudder that goes through her almost-unconscious body, the accompanying gasp. He unbuttons her jeans next, slides them down her hips and thighs, letting his fingers skim over her smooth skin as he reveals it. He removes her shirt next, a worn button down that he leaves pinned beneath her once he moves it down her arms. She’s just in her underwear now, still only half awake, and Kylo should really leave her be, but instead he tugs her underwear down and off so it can join the pile of clothes he’s created on the floor.

She’s so calm. He almost thinks that she should be less comfortable—she hardly knows him, even if she’s been here before and they’ve slept together. But this is strangely different and, with the added resonance of their earlier conversation, there is a new sort of intimacy.

He goes to remove her bra, trying to lift her slightly so her can reach behind to unhook it. She is obviously still awake, barely, and rolls onto her side so he can do it, then even lifts her arms so he can take it off more easily. She’s naked now, one arm resting on her abdomen while the other lies across the larger half of his bed. He can mostly restrain himself, but every few moments he allows his fingertips to brush over her, her hipbone, her shoulder, the underside of her arm.

_Mine,_ he thinks, and he comes dangerously close to saying it aloud. The word feels like it belongs on his tongue, in her head, _on her skin._ Free to look at her however he likes, his possessive urges flare up and devour him. He’s fucking _hard_ , but he ignores it, doesn’t even palm himself through his jeans, reveling in the feeling of desperation. It’s almost morbid.

“You’re such a creep,” she mumbles, looking at him with one squinted eye and adjusting her arm so it drapes over her breasts. Kylo immediately takes hold of it and moves it away so he can properly see her. A small part of him wants to push her thighs apart and press his tongue inside her until she’s _wide awake and begging for it,_ but mostly, he’s content to sit like this, watching her rest.

“ _Cold,”_ she grunts, and the sound is so youthful and sweet and demanding he can’t help but laugh. He stands to rifle through his drawers until he finds a t-shirt for her to wear.

“Here,” he says as he hands it to her, and she tugs it over her head, rolls onto her side, and falls back asleep on top of the covers. He takes a second to run his fingers through her hair, but then he leaves her be and goes to his studio.

* * *

 

Rey wakes up because she’s cold (not because of nightmares), because it’s _winter_ and she’s sleeping in just a t-shirt and no blankets. Her jaw aches a bit—she’s been clenching her teeth through the chill. She rolls over to look at the clock on Kylo’s bedside table. It’s only just past midnight, and she can’t have been asleep for more than an hour. Kylo is nowhere to be seen. The door to the bedroom is open and all the lights seem to be off. Still shivering, she crawls out of bed and goes out into the dark living room.

“ _Kylo?_ ” She whispers, too quietly for even her to hear. She’s exhausted, not thinking clearly, but she is also inexplicably anxious. She fiddles at the hem of Kylo’s shirt, hanging across her thighs, nervously wringing the black fabric as she silently walks across the apartment to his studio, where the door is closed.

She opens the door. Kylo is seated at his desk, stooping over something. She takes a step into the room and sees that he is sketching, solely by the illumination of the streetlight outside. She wonders why he hasn’t even turned on the lamp on his desk.

His hand moves rapidly across the page, clutching a stick of charcoal so hard it must be on the verge of breaking, his knuckles straining. It has stained his fingers black and, when he turns, she sees it smeared across his forehead, his lips, the curve of his left cheekbone. She raises a hand to his face, but before she can rub her thumb through the color, his hands are on her.

He abandons whatever it is he was working on without a second thought and pulls the shirt off of her, almost violently. She’s naked and she’s _cold,_ but his teeth are grazing her neck, her collarbone, he’s sucking hard on her skin. He scatters kisses down her body until he’s forced to kneel to continue. Her knees go wobbly when his tongue dips across her navel. Blood is rushing so loudly in her ears that she doesn’t hear him speak at first—murmuring against her skin in quiet breaths that sound like sobs. But when he looks up his face is dry, his shoulders shaking as he begs, “ _Rey, please._ ”

Something is wrong.

Something in the way Kylo is moving, the way he’s pleading, the intense look in his eyes, is terrifyingly wrong. Something at the back of her head is _screaming_ at her to get out, that this is bad for her. That this will ruin her. There’s a flash of something feral, and when he grips her thighs, begging again, she is sure her flesh bruises.

But something is wrong in her as well; she feels intoxicated, the room is spinning, her head is _pounding_ , and her judgment is most certainly impaired because despite how scared she is, she nods her head and lowers herself to kneel on the floor.

He gropes at her flesh, pinching at her skin as if keep her from disappearing. The black of the charcoal rubs off on every part of her he touches. She imagines it coating every last inch of her skin. She imagines the darkness submerging her. She imagines Kylo pulling her down into it. He’s like a weight, dragging her into the sea, as he presses her backwards to lie across the floor of his studio. Her bare skin against the cold of the hardwood should snap her to her senses, but instead she arches her back so one of his arms can curl under her waist. He crawls over her so his body is completely covering her own, blocking out the small stream of light coming in through the window.

“Rey,” he says desperately, shoving his pants and boxers down and maneuvering their bodies so his erection is poised between her thighs. He takes a hot second to lean over to his desk and pull a condom out of one of the drawers— _always prepared—_ and roll it over himself before returning to his place on top of her. He ruts against her for a second, and the feeling of the engorged head of his cock nudging her clit makes her see white.

“Wait,” she says suddenly, through the gray haze, when she feels him ready to press inside, because _something is_ _wrong_ and she hasn’t been prepared and as much as she wants _this,_ she doesn’t want him to hurt her. “Let me be on top.”

He looks at her blankly for a second, uncomprehending, before nodding and rolling onto his back, kicking his jeans off the rest of the way. He pulls her on top, so she’s resting on his abdomen, his cock resting teasingly on her backside. She leaves wetness behind on his skin when she lifts up unto her knees and inches back until he is pressing against her again. His hips jerk, enough for him to penetrate her slightly, just for a second. He’s straining his neck so her can properly see her and this isn’t comfortable for either of them, on the floor like this, but Rey doesn’t even think to ask that they move to the bed—she takes him in hand and slowly lowers herself onto him.

He feels bigger this time, from the angle. She feels him stretching every millimeter of her open and it makes all the muscles in her body quake from the strain of it. She squeezes her eyes shut, curls her fingers into fists around his shirt and _wills_ herself to go the rest of the way. It takes a few seconds before he’s fully sheathed inside her. He jerks up _hard_ and _fuck_ it hurts, she lets out a high whimper before she can stop herself. In apology, he grips her hand and presses her wrist to his lips.

“Just wait,” she says weakly, trying desperately to adjust. “Just a second.”

He stares at her, transfixed. Like every movement she makes is the most important thing he’s ever seen. She grimaces again and watches as he licks his lips in response. The light from outside illuminates his eyes; he looks predatory.

She wonders what she looks like to him.

Finally, she moves, rolling her hips just slightly, and his gaze breaks, his head dropping back against the floor with a thump. The groan he lets out is so loud and so _sexy_ she actually feels herself clench around him in response. She lifts up experimentally and lets gravity force her back down. The heat in her cheeks is unbearable. A few more undulations of her hips and she feels comfortable enough to take a hand off of Kylo’s chest to press it between her thighs, against her clit. She’s done this before, but it’s different with Kylo looking at her _like that._ It makes her dip her head self-consciously.

Experimentally, she clenches around him as she rubs at her clit just so, and he practically howls, his hands coming up against her ass so hard that the sound of skin slapping skin fills the room and her flesh _burns_. He takes control of the pace then, pulling her forward so his cock goes even deeper and— _fuck,_ presses her right where she needs it.   
“There, oh my god, there,” she says. Her voice is embarrassingly high and barely understandable, but he does it again, and again. Her lungs are burning; she can’t get enough air to prepare herself for the shock, every time his body rises to meet her own. She may be hyperventilating, but she can’t even _think_ to take a second to pause, to slow down even a little bit. She’s too _close._

Kylo’s hand catches hers, the one between her legs, pleasuring herself, and shoves it aside to make room for his own, rubbing viciously at that bundle of nerves even as his cock presses against her cervix. She keens, body going limp, mouth falling wide open as her orgasm grips her whole body for a long, desperate moment. Kylo sits up, using one arm to keep her moving through her climax.

When Kylo comes, just a second later, he bites her shoulder hard enough that she thinks he might break the skin. This is confirmed when he kisses her, his tongue seeking out every contour of her mouth, and she tastes the smallest amount of copper on him. She feels strangely dazed at the realization; it doesn’t shock her as much as it should. When he breaks the kiss to suck on the skin behind her ear, she runs a finger over the wound. There is only a little blood, hardly any at all. Part of her remembers how much she liked seeing the hickeys he left on her last week in the mirror. This mark will take longer to heal.

She must be feverish. Kylo lies back against the floor and Rey rolls off of him to tuck herself into the crook of his side. The cold floor against half her body clears her mind, but not nearly enough.

She doesn’t understand what has just happened. Minutes ago she was sleeping. She had expected to seek him out and convince him to come to bed, to keep her warm. Beside her, Kylo’s chest is rising and falling sporadically. She sees that his eyes are squeezed shut and it strikes her that he’s trying to calm himself. He stays like that for a long time, before his breathing evens out and he turns to look her in the eyes. His gaze flickers down to where he bit her, then back to her eyes.

 

Later, she stands to pull the drapes closed and return to sleep with Kylo on the floor of the studio until morning. They would sleep better in the bedroom, but the lush blanket he pulled off the chair in the corner is more comfortable than some beds she’s slept in, and she can’t bear to wake him.

In the moment it takes for her to pull the fabric shut, before the room is plunged into darkness, before she returns to the floor and clings to Kylo for warmth, her eyes skim over the ripped piece of paper upon which Kylo had been sketching.

For one shattering second, like a flash of lightning, she sees the image, the familiar arches, the recognizable slopes that make up her own face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Listen](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBxxEyVIdO4)
> 
>  
> 
> luvkurai.tumblr.com


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _She can’t know, he can’t tell her, she can’t see the look on his face when he says the words._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So sorry. Love you all.

Rey spent her twelfth birthday in the children’s ward of Niima’s only hospital. She had been there for two weeks when one of the nurses carried in a store-bought cake topped with twelve candles. A few of the younger children screamed with delight, their parents quieting them to join the nurses and the older children in singing her ‘Happy Birthday’. Rey knew it wasn’t her real birthday, just a day scribbled on form at the police station, passed on to the officials at social services. She had never really liked it because her foster families tended to ignore it completely, while the teachers at her school seemed set on acknowledging it. That was worse—it made her feel like a liar. That feeling came over her again, when the nurse placed the cake in front of her so she could blow it out from her bed. The eyes of everyone in the room made her nervous, a bit jumpy, and she remembers wanting to run for the hills. But she had always been good at pretending, putting up a false front; she blew the candles out.

The piece of cake the nurse gave her was smaller than the other children’s, because the doctors were monitoring her eating carefully and the nurse didn’t want to deviate too far from her prescribed meal plan. Rey only managed to eat a few bites before she was sick.

 

She wakes in the morning to the taste of bile at the back of her throat. She presses the back of her hand against her eyelids as she remembers that it’s been almost a full day since she last ate—having had classes through lunch and into the early evening, when she met Kylo in front of her dorm. She doesn’t let herself think about hunger. The rest of Rey’s body aches with the familiar pain of sleeping on a hard surface. Her spine is stiff and her neck hurts when she turns it. Aside from the pains of lying on the floor for so long, she feels her limbs protest as she sits up—the new bruises from her late-night _activities_ with Kylo having already blossomed all over her skin. In the dim light streaming through the closed drapes, she spies the shapes of fingers on the sides of her legs and her hips. She suddenly remembers the bite mark on her shoulder and presses her hand to it. It _stings_ and in the sobering morning light she recognizes that she’ll need to tell Kylo not to do that again. Finn and Poe made a big deal out of the hickey he left on her neck and she flushes at the thought of what they’d do if she wore a shirt with a low neckline or the fabric slipped and they saw _this._

It strikes her that she should have reasons other than her friends’ reaction to the mark to tell Kylo that he shouldn’t _bite her._ It hurt, for one thing. It was scary as hell—but she _liked_ that it was scary, last night. She knows that a part of her liked the look in Kylo’s eyes when he lost control. She felt more than wanted; it made her feel _needed,_ as if Kylo needed her to breath, like water or air. It calmed that persistent fear of abandonment, of being left alone, because how could he possibly leave her if he held her that tightly and looked at her that desperately? But that is the part of her that needs to be reigned in and contained, because it’s dangerous and _this_ , her reaction to an arguably terrifying action on the part of her lover, is proof that it makes her make bad decisions.

Kylo is nowhere to be seen. The door to the studio is firmly closed and Rey is alone on the floor. With a groan, she wonders what time it is, sees on the wall that it is just past eight in the morning. She has time to get to class. She stretches as she gets up and glances at the desk out of the corner of her eyes. The sketch is gone, the sticks of charcoal cleared away, as if they were never there. Rey doesn’t look for the paper. Instead, she picks Kylo’s shirt up off the floor and puts it on, then pulls the blanket around her shoulders and opens the door to the rest of the apartment.

Kylo is sitting on the couch, doing something on his laptop with a cup of coffee in his hand. He’s wearing a pair of sweatpants, no shirt, because the fact that it is _cold_ apparently doesn’t bother him.

“Hey,” she says, when he looks at her, eyes strangely bright. The sound of her own whimper, from when she was riding him last night, echoes in her ears.

“Hey. I was just about to come wake you up. You said you have class at nine, right?” She nods, wondering what Kylo did with her clothes. She hazily remembers the feeling of him sliding her clothes off her body, kissing her feet, helping her into the shirt she’s wearing now. She can’t remember anyone ever taking care of her like that, carrying her to bed. It makes her insides warm up, makes her forget about telling him off for biting her. She steps forward to kneel on the couch beside him, the blanket draping of them both, so she can kiss his face, just below his eye, on his cheekbone. He presses his arm to her back and pulls her close, hugging her so hard breathing hurts, but she doesn’t dare tell him to let go.

When he does loosen his hold, she slides away slowly, sitting back on her haunches so he can look into her face—that familiar, intense look he gives her when he wants to say something to her but won’t, and _god,_ she’s known him for less than a week, how can she already pull apart the tiniest ticks of his facial expressions?

She stands, finally, because she needs to get dressed. Fifteen minutes later, the two of them get into Kylo’s car so he can drive her back to the campus. She doesn’t offer to take the bus, only partly because it won’t get her back in time for class. Over the course of the car ride, Rey discloses her work and university schedule for the next week, doesn’t even try to put up a fight as Kylo attempts to monopolize every bit of her allotted leisure time. Tomorrow, he’ll buy her lunch after her test; Thursday, he’ll pick her up after work so she can spend the night; Saturday, Rey will meet him at his apartment after working the day shift; Sunday, she doesn’t have to work until evening, so she promises to study at his place in the morning. Finn and Poe won’t be happy—she promised to go out with them this weekend. Maybe she could convince Kylo to go with them, but she isn’t sure he’d be happy with the idea (isn’t sure she wants him around her friends, if she’s being honest).

The TIE pulls up outside her building. Rey has a little less than 20 minutes to change her clothes and get to class, but Kylo takes hold of her arm before she can move to get out of the car. In the midst of a quick goodbye kiss, Kylo’s hand slips beneath the collar of her shirt and brushes his fingers along the aching mark his teeth seared into her skin.

* * *

 

Kylo keeps his eyes trained on the front door of the gallery while he speaks with the owner. He doesn’t care that he’s being rude, doesn’t care that the man could probably get his work showcased in any gallery in the city, get any number of Coruscant’s more well-off patrons of the arts interested in his paintings. He isn’t interested in ‘buttering the man up’ or ‘playing his cards right’ or any other synonyms for whoring himself out to the highest bidder.

What he is interested in, is watching the door so he sees Rey the second she comes in.

Outside the glass doors, it’s raining—Kylo can see it pouring down under the light of the streetlamps—as it has been for days, since icy winter finally melted away to wet spring. It’s been almost a month since he met Rey. She sleeps at his place most nights, only sleeps in her dorm room when she has to work an early shift and refuses to let Kylo wake up early to drive her. She’s never invited him to sleep at her place, probably because (as he knows) he wouldn’t be able to comfortably fit in her bed, and Kylo is secretly glad for it. He would feel too guilty, standing in that room. The few nights that he’s alone in his bed, he likes to imagine Rey shivering, wishing she were there with him, in his arms. He likes to imagine her missing the comfort of his apartment, her thinking of it as _home_ and of him as _important._ He likes to imagine her wanting him as much as he wants her.

He’s working himself up to asking Rey to move in with him after she graduates. He knows he should wait a month or two, but he also knows that job offers will be coming in soon and she’ll start looking for a new place to live without consulting him first. The words (along with so many others) are constantly on the tip of his tongue when she’s around; he’s constantly ready to ask. But he’s worried that he’s moving too quickly, that Rey is going to slam her foot on the brakes any second now.

Last week, Kylo gave her a copy of the key to his apartment after they’d been out for dinner and Rey had spotted a classmate or a coworker or _who gives a fuck_ and introduced Kylo to the girl as her boyfriend _._ Her _boyfriend._ The word and the shy, unsure glance she gave him afterwards, (because they had been dancing around labels for weeks) both infuriated him and made him want to kneel on the floor and kiss her feet in adoration. It was simultaneously too much and nowhere near enough. Because if he’s her boyfriend, then that makes them a couple—an idea that makes his heart clench so hard it hurts—but it also makes her his girlfriend, which isn’t _enough_ in the same way that a drop of water isn’t enough to qualm the pain of dehydration, in the same way that a crumb couldn’t ward of starvation. But he didn’t know how he could begin to express this idea, let alone voice it to her, so instead he kissed her inside of his car, and kissed her against the door to his building, and kissed her into his couch, and kissed her between her legs until she came so hard her fingernails drew blood on his scalp.

Remembering makes his veins thrum with heat, makes him wonder again, _Where is Rey?_ Her shift should have ended an hour ago. He should have insisted that he pick her up from work, but she didn’t want him late for this event, despite his assertion that he didn’t want to be there in the first place.

“I got a call earlier today from someone interested in buying that one,” the owner says, he spares the man a glance when he gestures to one of Kylo’s paintings. Kylo doesn’t bother turning to see which one. He doesn’t care; they’re old ones that he finished but couldn’t quite work into a series, or couldn’t sell in other gallery openings. He hasn’t exactly produced anything he could sell lately, despite spending every moment away from Rey in his studio.

Kylo spews some bullshit about how that’s ‘good news’, but his attention snaps back to the front door when the sleek door slides open.

Han Solo walks in and Kylo sees red.

He walks away from the gallery owner, who is halfway through a preposterous statement about how Kylo should consider talking to a reporter he knows about his creative process (as if Kylo would ever put himself through _that_ again).

“What are you doing here?” He asks. Kylo hasn’t seen him in about ten years, maybe longer. The man aged a bit in that time, and his wrinkles are far more pronounced than he remembered as he lifts an eyebrow at Kylo. A nearby couple is staring at him, and he realizes that he spoke too loudly.

“I came to see my son’s paintings.” He glances over Kylo’s shoulder at them (Kylo doesn’t let himself think about how the man knows which ones are his) and he wants to drag him out of the building because he doesn’t _deserve_ to see them.

“You aren’t welcome here,” Kylo snarls, but with the good sense to lower his voice enough that half of Coruscant’s art community doesn’t hear. Han Solo’s eyes are sad and bitter and it makes Kylo want to rip his own eyes out of his skull. Han puts his hands up, either in mock surrender or in an effort to keep him calm.

“Did my mother send you?” He says ‘my mother’ and it burns his tongue, but it’s been years and he still can’t bring himself to refer to Leia Organa by her name like he can with Han Solo.

Han laughs humorlessly, says, “I’m probably the last person she’d send.”

Kylo rolls his eyes. “Right. You probably haven’t seen her in as long as I have.” His parents went years apart from one another, even when Kylo was a kid named Ben that wanted his family to stop ripping at the seams. He heard of their formalized divorce through word of mouth a few years after the fact, long after he’d left the city.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Han replies dryly. Kylo thinks of the sound of his parents’ bickering filtering through the walls of their condo when he was growing up and tries to picture the two of them meeting now, civilly discussing their disappointment of a son.

“What?” He scoffs. “Trying to make things work after all these years?”

“I didn’t come to discuss the relationship between your mother and I, Ben.”

He bristles, is about to raise his arms to push the man into the nearest sculpture before he remembers where he is and how many people are around him. So instead he steps forward (is thankful that he managed to outgrow Han Solo by a handful of inches) and hisses, “ _Don’t call me that._ ”

“I’m not calling you—whatever it is you go by now. Come on, despite what you think of me, I’m not here with some underhanded ulterior motive. I just want to talk.”

“I have nothing to say to you.”

His voice shakes a little on the last statement.

“Then you can _listen._ ”

* * *

 

Rey is late. She knows Kylo is probably stewing at the gallery, but she’s certain he’ll relax once she arrives. She wants to scream as the bus pulls yet _again_ into an unscheduled stop. She checks her phone. No unmissed calls from Kylo, which is a bit of a surprise. Fifteen minutes later and the bus finally stops a block from the gallery. She practically runs down the sidewalk, despite the fact that she’s wearing heels, but she’s _late_ and the rain is already soaking through her hair. She locates the studio easily—all the buildings are marked in the same sleek numbering. Under the balcony outside she tries desperately to fix her hair (but who is she kidding, she doesn’t fit in in places like this no matter what her hair looks like). She’s just here for Kylo anyways and she gets the impression that he doesn’t particularly care what she looks like.

The doors slide open before her as she finally swallows her pride and rushes inside. She sweeps the gallery—one large room with high ceilings and a table of champagne and small plates of food off to one side. It’s busier than she expected and she again feels a pang of worry at how she is dressed. Most of the women are in dresses that probably cost her food budget for the year. She takes a deep breath and steps a bit farther in, looking for Kylo. He’s taller than everyone; it only takes another glance for her to spot him, off to the side talking to someone. Rey raises a hand to catch his attention, unsure if she should interrupt the conversation, and she stops in her tracks at the look that crosses his face when he sees her. He steps toward her immediately and Rey is embarrassed for how rude he is to the other man.

“Rey,” he says, a bit breathlessly. There’s a familiar dark look in his eyes, less restrained than usual, and she suspects it has something to do with the man turning to face them.

He steps forward to stand beside Kylo and says pointedly, “Aren’t you going to introduce me?”

Kylo doesn’t look away from Rey as he gives a sullen, “No.”

Then, he takes her arm roughly in his hand and begins to tug her towards the door she entered through.

“Kylo—wait,” Rey says, almost twisting her heel as she stumbles behind him. She wrenches her arm from his grip. So he has to turn and speak with her. “What’s going on?”

“We’re leaving.” She feels annoyance tug at her, at the base of her neck, but she doesn’t give into it. She has to be patient.

“Why? I just got here. I wanted to look around.”

“Rey, _please._ ” He’s speaking quietly, but the urgency in his voice and the way he’s glancing back over her shoulder betrays how desperate he is to get out of the gallery. “I’ll explain in the car.”

She shifts her jaw in consideration, but it’s his event, and if he so intensely wants to leave, who is she to deny him? She gives a single nod and follows him out, sparing a single glance back into the gallery, before the doors close, at the man they’ve left in their wake.

“Who was that?” She asks, once they are seating in the TIE. He seems immediately more relaxed, as if sealing himself in the car with her has separated him from whatever it was that had him so tense before. He starts the car and pulls out of the parking lot, onto the main road.

“Do you mind if I smoke?” He asks. She’s a bit surprised—she did know that he is a smoker, can smell it on his clothes a lot of the time, but he’s never smoked around her.

“Of course,” she replies, opening her own window a crack, despite the rain, because while she doesn’t mind him smoking in his own car, she doesn’t particularly want to inhale the fumes. At the stoplight he lights his cigarette, taking a long drag and angling the exhale away from her, out his window.

“That was Han Solo,” he finally says.

“Your father?” She asks. She realizes immediately that it is a misstep from the way he cringes, his grip on the cigarette tightening briefly. “What was he doing there?”

Kylo hasn’t mentioned his parents since that night weeks ago when they took a drive out of the city and she told him that she was a foster kid. She knows it’s a sore subject and he doesn’t like thinking about it.

“He wanted to talk,” he says. His voice is strangely open, as if he’s keeping something from her. “He wants me to visit my mother.”

“Are you going to?”

“No.”

She knows better than to ask why—she knows she won’t get an answer different from the last time, and she doesn’t want to hear the same words a second time. She shivers a little from the cold air coming in the windows. Kylo notices, and though he’s only halfway through the cigarette, he drops it onto the pavement and closes the windows.

She considers asking if he’s ok, or if he wants to talk about it, but somehow she thinks he would be offended, would take it as an affront, that she doesn’t think he can handle a short conversation with his estranged father. So instead she reaches over and lightly grips the fabric of his pants, gives him a smile, when he looks at her, that is meant to be reassuring, and hopefully carries none of her own biases towards _family_ and _loneliness._

When they get to Kylo’s apartment, the rain has briefly stopped. The dark sky is still overcast, however, and Rey is under no illusions that it will clear. They take the stairs up to the apartment, rather than the elevator, because Kylo seems like he needs to burn some energy, despite the fact that Rey is in heels.

Once they are inside, Kylo kisses her, presses his tongue into her mouth so all Rey can comprehend for a minute is _smoke_ and _Kylo_ and _warmth._ She wants to drag him to the couch and ride him, but he seems like he still needs to relax more, and she’s tried to make it a personal rule not to sleep with him when he’s so on edge, because as much as she wants him _now_ , she needs to exercise control.

She whispers, a flirtatious lilt to her tone, “Why don’t you go take a shower, to relax, and then you can make me dinner.” She grins, so he knows the demand is in good humor.

“And then?” He asks, nipping at her jaw.

“And then you can fuck me into the couch cushions.” He hums, like he’s considering whether or not he wants to do that, before kissing her cheek and heading for the bedroom.

* * *

 

Kylo turns the water temperature as cold as it will go. So cold he can’t control his own shivering. A hot shower would perhaps be better for this, for burning the thoughts and feelings out of himself, but he strangely wants to feel his fingers and toes go numb until they hurt. Once the sensation has mostly seeped out of his limbs, he turns it back to a normal temperature, savoring how he can barely feel the water on his arms for a few minutes.

Han Solo is dying. That’s what he wanted to tell him, why he came to the gallery. He didn’t have Kylo’s address, or phone number, but he’d seen an advertisement in a magazine about how his work would be shown there. For some reason, Solo had thought it was appropriate to show up at what was essentially a _work event_ for Kylo, to tell him about the tumor the doctors found in his stomach, and that there is nothing to be done. He’ll be dead in months.

Kylo doesn’t care. He can’t care. His mind is numb (numb like his arms and legs from the cold), numb to anything and everything concerning the people that gave him life.

He doesn’t _care._

He wants to scream until his lungs burst, but Rey is in the next room. She can’t know, he can’t tell her, she can’t see the look on his face when he says the words. He doesn’t know himself what his face would look like—would he cry, or retain the blank look he gave Han Solo, when he told him of the disease?—but whatever mask it is he would wear, she can’t see it. She can’t know.

* * *

 

She shouldn’t be doing this.

Kylo trusts her enough to give her a key, and she decides to sneak around his place and go through his things while he’s in the shower? Especially minutes after he saw his father at the gallery. She should be ashamed of herself. But she continues, stepping across the threshold and into Kylo’s studio. She feels possessed, as she searches. Like some sort of demon has seized control of her limbs and made her desperate to see what she so easily disregarded weeks ago. The uncharacteristic shaking of her fingers seems to support this, as she moves around the room, flicking quickly through sketchbooks and disregarding box after box of paints and worn-down brushes.

Finally, she tugs open the drawers of Kylo’s desk, and in the last one she finds what she’s been looking for. In her rush she pulls the whole drawer out. For a short moment she struggles to push it back into the opening, but the picture on top distracts her and she ends up leaving the drawer on the floor. She picks it up with her fingertips, as if worried about leaving prints, and looks at it closely.

She is sleeping in the picture, one hand up against her chin, lax fingers curled in a loose fist. Her mouth hangs slightly open. It isn’t exactly a photograph, but somehow the way her eyes are drawn, imperceptibly clenched closed, captures a tension that a photo never could. It isn’t the same one that she saw on the desk after she found him sketching.

Beneath the sketch in her hands was a pile and her heart is beats fast in her ears as she picks up the next. She is awake in this one, a slight smile on her face, as she stares out at the viewer, but again, there’s something wrong, something added, something missing.

This is so much worse than she expected. The pile is massive, and as she goes through them she slowly realizes that Kylo has specifically hidden them all in one place, away from somewhere she could easily see them. He’s obviously drawn all of them from memory, she’s never modeled for him (although she supposes some of them he could have sketched watching her while she slept without her realizing), and it somehow shows. Each one is varied in slight ways, be it the curve of her lips or the jut of her chin, but the finished product is always undeniably _herself, Rey_. Her heart pounds in her ears as she thinks of how Kylo sat at his desk and sketched her in charcoal, over and over and over again, in the mere weeks that she’s known him. A lot of the drawings are larger, more detailed than she thought possible for something drawn from memory. They would have taken hours, the type of thing that wouldn’t normally be hidden away, should be framed and hanging on a wall. But she knows why they aren’t, of course. She knows why Kylo hasn’t shown them to her; all of them, each and every one, betray a certain brand of emotion Kylo holds toward her. He’s obsessed with her.

Rey looks at every single one, until suddenly she is at the bottom of the pile and finds something else, something out of place. For one blissful moment, she isn’t sure what she is looking at.

Then, she realizes.

* * *

 

He stands in the shower for long enough that the water begins to dip from lukewarm to cold again. He finally gets out and dries himself off, leaving his hair mostly wet, dressing in sweatpants and nothing else, because he’s hoping to be naked again soon enough.

Kylo opens the door to his bedroom and finds the living room empty. His heart skips a beat and he already knows where she would be, if she’s still in the apartment, but he calls out anyways, “Rey?”

“In here.”

Rey is sitting cross-legged on the floor of his studio. In front of her is a drawer, pulled off its hinges from the desk, its contents messily emptied onto the floor. Around thirty scraps of paper covered the floor, some larger than others, all carrying Rey’s face, rendered by his own hand. White-hot anger grips at his insides— _those are mine_. She doesn’t have the right to go through his things. And this, these drawings are worse than anything. They may as well be his private thoughts. He moves toward her with the intention of shoving every last sketch back into the drawer, keeping his studio _locked_ in the future.

He opens his mouth, to scathingly tell her that he can draw what he likes, ready to yell, to ask how _dare_ she go through his things, invade his privacy?—but the words die in his throat.

“What is this?” She asks quietly, holding up a scrap of paper for him to see. It isn’t one of his sketches of Rey, but a piece of notebook paper, math equations on one side, a chaotic sketch of a single hand on the other.

The picture he took from Rey’s garbage can, weeks ago, when he broke into her room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Listen](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuZnFTdeoE0) 
> 
> luvkurai.tumblr.com


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _She's been such an idiot to not see the signs._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Um so wow. The amount of time this took. It's been 90% since I posted the last chapter 8 billion years ago but. You know how it is. 
> 
> At a whopping 6k, I considered splitting this in two, but decided against it because I think it flows better as one chapter. Thank you for more than A THOUSAND kudos! I really appreciate all the love this has received. Thanks so much for reading and please enjoy!

When Kylo was twelve, and still a weak child named Ben Solo, his mother threw a half-full glass of wine in his father’s face. He wasn’t supposed to see, should have been up in his room, where his parents had sent him more than an hour earlier, when the explosive fight first began. Instead of obeying, he had crept back down the stairs and curled up beside the open doorway to listen to them shout. It wasn’t about anything particularly new, Han had disappeared for a week and Leia had been worried sick. He denied all her accusations, calling her paranoid and _hysterical._

He knew their family was different than a lot of his friends’. They didn’t have things like money problems or alcoholism. They had two grown adults that couldn’t be in the company of one another for more than five minutes without screaming. They had a twelve-year old son that couldn’t seem to stop getting into fights at school, that was incapable of living up to their expectations, that was _an embarrassment._ Things were better before, when he was too young to really understand the looks Han gave him when he picked him up from the Principal’s office, the steely glare his mother gave the man, silently saying _‘he takes after you, this is your fault’._ Because Ben had to be someone’s _fault_ , didn’t he? He didn’t notice, when he was younger, that those moments were the only interactions he had with his parents some days, who were too busy living their respective lives to notice the man that their son was growing into.

On this particular night, Han had chosen the ‘silent method’, blankly looking back at Leia rather than standing and yelling back. He’d make a comment here and there, maybe shrug. It was rare, for him to be so quiet (Han Solo is nothing if not a talker), and it made his mother absolutely livid. Her voice rose steadily throughout the conversation. Kylo isn’s sure what she said that night anymore. He has memories of it, but they are almost certainly fabricated by his impressionable mind, blown out of proportion as the years went by. What he is sure of, however, is the sudden sound of liquid splashing thickly against the floor, loud enough to be heard even over the sounds of the fights, loud enough that Ben rose from his perch to step into the doorway and look—

The image of blood, covering Han Solo’s face and torso, seared into his mind.

It wasn’t blood, of course it wasn’t, only red wine, and not very much of it, at that. It didn’t even really look like blood. But Kylo still remembers the thoughts that went through Ben’s head, as for a split second he truly believed his mother had attacked his father.

The following minutes were chaotic—Han calling Leia rude names, storming out of the room, Leia yelling at Ben for being out of his room, forcing him back up the stairs. The yelling continued on the landing of their condo until finally, the front door slammed shut, and all was silent.

Ben laid awake all night, unable to sleep, trying to remember if his parents had ever really been happy. Wondering if they were in the past, perhaps before he was born.

Before he ruined everything.

 

When Kylo sees that hand, curled up and tense, drawn across the paper, all his anger dissipates, replaced by a childlike mix of anxiety at having been caught red-handed, and irrational anger at being scolded. He remains silent.

“What is this?” She repeats. When he still doesn’t respond, she lets out a steely, “Kylo, this is _mine._ ”

“You threw it away,” he says, petulant, as if it is a legitimate excuse. He knows before the words leave his mouth that it is the wrong thing to say.

She bristles, almost snarling, “ _Where did you get this?”_

“From your dorm room.”

“ _When_ were you in my dorm room?”

He considers lying, but she must have some idea of when she drew the picture. “You left your key here, the first night you stayed over. I went to your dorm and left it for you to find.” He watches her consider this, trying to understand the insanity—that he broke into her room the day after they first slept together. Hours after they made love in the shower.

“You’re talented, Rey. Why didn’t you tell me that you’re an artist?”

“Stop. Don’t change the subject,” she says. He snaps his mouth shut. Her tone puts him on the offensive, though he knows nothing good can come of it. She stands up from the floor and rubs her fingers across her temple, eyes closed, as if nursing a headache.

Voice dripping in enmity, he says, “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“I want you to tell me _why you were going through my room.”_ She exhales shakily. “I want you to explain to me why you broke into my room, instead of _calling me_ to say that I left my key here.”

He thinks of his boiling-hot anger that day, when he saw that name light up on her cellphone. _Finn._ He thinks of turning the tables and asking her what she was doing, going through _his studio_ , but stops himself. His hands are balled into fists at his side, and he can feel them shaking. He has to pull himself together—he can’t let her know—

“I just wanted to see.” It’s probably the same answer she would give, if asked. “I wanted to know—“

What did he want to know? What could he possibly he say that would fix this? He thinks back, tries to remember what the reason was, because even if it’s as insane as he knows it is, maybe he can break it down into something simpler that Rey could understand. But he isn’t good with words, never has been; there’s a reason he picked the visual arts to express himself.

She shakes her head, running her fingers through her hair to calm herself down. Slowly, she looks back toward the pile of sketches on the floor. She bends to pick one up and for a second Kylo expects her tense fingers to rip it to shreds—that is what he would do, after all. But her grip goes softer and she holds the picture with a surprising delicacy.

“This isn’t ok, Kylo,” she whispers, still not looking anywhere near him. “This is scary.”

 _Scary._ It’s like every word ever used to describe him is cutting into him at once, leaving shards in his insides, across the underside of his flesh. _Unhinged._ Rey is afraid of him. It’s what he’s been trying to prevent for weeks, trying to make himself better so she didn’t find out. _Crazy._ He doesn’t know who he was kidding—there’s no hiding it. Even if he kept this particular indiscretion under wrap, it was only a matter of time until something else happened.

He doesn’t want her to be scared of him. It’s such a sharp distinction from every other interaction in his life, how little he cares about what strangers on the street, or acquaintances, or even potential buyers think of him. More than once he’s actively attempted to ensure their anxiety at interacting with him.

But Rey is different; she has been since practically the first word out of her mouth in that gallery.

“I love you,” he says. It’s true. He loves her more than he’s loved anything or anyone; he _needs her,_ with a desperation that makes him despise himself. He watches as her face snaps towards his, finally looking at him again, just for a moment. “I know you’re angry, and this isn’t the right time to say it—you don’t have to say anything back.”

_If she doesn’t say it back, I’ll burn this building to the ground._

* * *

 

Rey is silent for a long time. She circles the studio, feeling trapped, feeling the walls closing in on her from all sides. Outside, the dim of the rainy day has faded into black night. She circles back to where she’s spread the pages across the floor. Her heart jumps in her throat as she sees version after version of herself, staring up at her. She leans down to rifle through them again.

 _I love you._ The words echo in her ears, and she can feel Kylo’s eyes on her, watching her every move. Is that what he thought, when he drew these? She can’t quite see the feeling behind these images—only the sheer wrongness of them. 

“This is you,” she says, almost a whisper, lifting the piece of scrap paper off the floor. “Your hand, on the steering wheel, the night we met.”

She doesn’t know why she tells him this. She doesn’t owe him an explanation; she doesn’t owe him anything, at this point _._ But she remembers sitting at her desk that night, thinking about the kiss, mulling over the tiniest bits of his body language, as if there was something hidden for her to find. She remembers absently sketching out the form of his hand, curled around the steering wheel of the TIE. It was nothing, a thoughtless moment, and she let it fall into the bin beside her desk. She’d done other drawings since then, of Kylo’s eyes, his mouth. They all met the same end as this one—or as it should have, at least.

Kylo looks from her to the paper in her hand, and she sees the smallest bit of recognition flicker in his face.

“You’re talented,” he says, and she hates the way she swells with pride at the praise. He pauses, then says, “I saw the sketchbook, too. The one you keep in your bedside table. The ocean.”

Her breath catches in her throat at this. _That’s private_ , she thinks. This is worse than anything else—worse than him breaking into her dorm, going through her trash, probably scouring every inch of the room. But even as she feels a deep, anxious sort of anger, she thinks, _what good will it do?_ He can’t know what it means. _But he’s seen it. He’s seen everything—_

“I saw the island,” he says.  She feels naked.

He sits on the floor in front of her, the sketches spread out between them.

“There’s no place like that in Jakku.” He isn’t asking, or even wondering, but he’s right—the island, made of jagged stones rising out of the middle of a vast, tumultuous ocean, is not from the memory of someplace in Jakku, or even from a picture. She knows he wants to ask, can feel the question hanging between them, of _why_ she’s drawn that island, hundreds and hundreds of times, enough to fill the little notebook she keeps hidden away beside her bed, and other notebooks before that one. But she doesn’t tell him why. How could she? The words to explain are evasive even to herself.

 _I love you._ She tries to remember the last time someone said that to her, but she can’t remember a single time. _I love you._ She looks toward him, suddenly aware that he’s managed to distract her from what he did.

“You broke into my room and went through my things,” she says, but his expression doesn’t change, not even in the slightest. What does Kylo know of love? What does _Rey_ know of love? Yes, he is older than her, could have had whirlwind romances in the past to rival their own—her heart clenches painfully at the idea, despite her logical train of thought. She doesn’t quite believe that, though. His actions don’t exactly indicate any sort of long-term relationship experience. “Are you—are you even _sorry?_ ”

“Of course I am,” he says, hands stonily pressed to the hardwood floor. “I’m _sorry,_ but I can’t undo it—tell me what I can do to fix this and I’ll do it.”

What does she want from him? She shouldn’t even still be here. She should have left by now.

“I could help you—“ he says out of nowhere. “I could help you practice. You could be really good, Rey.”

It takes her a moment to realize that they’ve shifted back, that he’s offering to help her hone her artistic talent, of all things. A bubble of rage—that he would offer to be her teacher in the first place, or that he thinks so little of her choice to become an engineer that he thinks he need only offer her an alternative for her to abandon it. Or that it could even _begin_ to make up for what he has done.

* * *

 

“ _Stop,_ ” Rey snaps. “This isn’t—I don’t want you to teach me how to—“

Kylo stands up slowly. Perhaps it was too much to mention the island. As much as he has desperately pondered it for weeks, wondering what it could possibly mean, she visibly views him having seen it as more of an infringement than any of his other missteps. He remembers the shading of the water, the harsh lines illustrating the stone that rose from it. The same island, rising from stormy seas, over and over again, page after page. He cannot begin to fathom why Rey would draw such a thing, so many times. It cannot be a place from her childhood in Jakku. He has wondered if perhaps Rey travelled to the coast somewhere, and found herself fixated on the image of a scrap of land rising from the open seas (fixation, he can understand). But Rey does not seem to have travelled very far, nor is the type to become so attached to a mere vacation spot. He wants to ask, but he is almost certainly at the end of Rey’s patience. He can see her anger building up, shining in her eyes.

“I should go,” she says. Kylo’s eyes snap and he steps forward just as she stands.

“Stay. Please.” If she leaves, he doesn’t know if he’ll be able to get her back here. He can’t face the void she’ll leave in her wake—

Her wrist is in his hand, though he doesn’t recall reaching for it. He realizes how tightly he must be gripping her and loosens his hold. Not enough to let go, just enough to allow her to pull away if she wanted to. But she doesn’t pull away, and he brushes his fingertips gently along the sensitive skin covering her veins and steps closer. She looks up at him and he watches as the fear in her eyes thaws to anger, to annoyance, to confusion. He thinks he can handle confusion.

He lifts her hand, slowly, to his mouth, and presses his lips to the thin flesh of her wrist. She’s giving him a look (eyes slightly narrowed to say that she knows very well what he’s doing and he shouldn’t even bother trying), but her breath catches and she shifts her hand out of his grip, to cup his face. It feels like—

Time skips again, and they’re kissing. He doesn’t remember who initiated it, but Rey is pulling him closer, so he doesn’t care to try and remember. Their chests are pressed together, both her hands on his face, and his palm pressed under her shirt against the small of her back. She’s warm and soft as ever and he imagines the pounding in his head is her pulse, melding with his.

“Does this mean—“ he begins to ask.

But she cuts him off with a harsh, “ _Don’t.”_ She moves backwards to lean against the corner of his desk and he kicks the displaced drawer out of the way as he follows. It bangs against one of the shelves along the wall, but Kylo ignores it, lifts Rey onto the desk and dips to kiss her neck. She wraps her arms around him and he can feel the hot brush of her breath across his ear. Her fingers in his hair, tugging him away, tugging him in, are maddening. He wants to rip them from his scalp and bite each one individually, watch how her face changes at the slightest touch of pain. Along this train of thought, he digs his teeth into her neck, not biting exactly, but hinting that he might.

But the hint of it alone has her jerking back, shoving him away forcibly. She touches her hand to where his teeth had skimmed her flesh, then looks at her palm as if to check for blood. There’s nothing, Kylo knows. She gives him a wary look, running her fingers through her hair. She’s breathing hard, cheeks flushed, like she’s just run a marathon, Kylo realizes, from just kissing. He feels a spark of victory.

“I liked it, when you were marked,” Kylo confesses, to fill the silence, moving slowly back into her space. He has no more rational thought to operate on, to keep Rey here. No more half-truths to soften the situation, to set Rey at ease. Rey puts one palm on the desk and places most of her weight on it, like she can’t hold herself up. Her head is dipped and Kylo can see the nape of her neck.

“I liked it when you looked like you were mine.” Her breath catches as he moves to stand beside her and presses his hand to that spot, where he left that bite mark, weeks ago, in this very room. If he looks closely, he imagines he can still see where his canines dug in. Her eyes slide shut and she tilts her head away, leaning into the touch.

“Kylo,” She says, and nothing else.

“It’s ok,” he whispers. “I feel it too.”

He kisses her neck, running his tongue up her skin to the base of her chin. She turns—not to get away, but to brace herself more effectively. She leans forward, over the desk, and he follows behind, kissing the nape of her neck, planting his hands on the desk on either side of her. She presses back into him and he puts a hand on her hip, moves it under her shirt so he can feel her skin.  
“Rey.”

He feels how the muscles of her stomach shudder, just from his mouth on her neck. He’s hard—he plans to ignore it, to focus on her (this is still him trying to apologize, after all), but she grinds back—

It’s a long distance, between the studio and his bedroom, but they make it. Kylo feels better there, with physical distance between them and their fight. He can place the idea of her leaving aside and focus on the patches of skin he can reach between her clothes. She’s vibrating under him, pulling him impossibly close and tugging his shirt away.

He’s already so close to the edge. Just from a bit of touching, but she’s going so slow, reveling every inch of his chest as it is revealed. He wants to push forward, to rip the fabric from her body and bury himself inside her, but he can’t bring himself to stop her from touching him like this, like she’s unearthing all these parts of him for the first time.

And it’s so much like the first time. So new and fervent. But it’s different too—he knows her now. Knows how she likes it. He knows that if he bites at her neck she’ll gasp and pull his hair. He knows that if he pushes her pants and underwear down and out of the way, buries his face between her thighs, she will sob and yell his name. He knows that when he presses his cock inside her opening, barely pressing against that heavenly heat, she will meet his eyes and arch her back and beg.

“Fuck me, _fuck me_ ,” she says. When Kylo presses inside her, feels that first insanity-driven burst of friction, he swears that he would give up everything for Rey. He wants to. He wants to burn every bridge and give Rey the ashes.

Her mouth is open, cheeks flushed, eyes flickering with every thrust. He tells her, “You’re so beautiful. You’re so—“

So what? The words, as always, escape him. It’s whatever he was trying to capture in all those sketches of her. Some nameless quality that is noticeably sucking his lucidity away, every centimeter deeper he drives into her.

“Don’t stop,” she whimpers, rocking on the bed. “ _Please_ don’t stop.”

“I won’t,” he whispers. “Whatever you want. God. Rey.”

He touches her clit again, circling his thumb and feeling how she clenches around him inside, when he does it just right.

When she comes, it’s on a formless curse, voice vibrating as Kylo lets the orgasm drag out, holding off his own pleasure for as long as possible before falling with her.

“Kylo—“ she says, the aftershocks of her orgasm still making her heave with breathlessness. Her legs are spread impossibly wide, wrapped around his hips, her right hand braced against the headboard behind her. “I think—“

She breaks off, and Kylo thinks he understands what is hanging there, between them. He kisses her again, slow and deep, tongue fitting against hers.

“I know what I did was wrong,” Kylo whispers against her lips. “But I—I haven’t done anything like that since, I swear. I—“

Her eyes are open now and he debates, one final time, whether or not to tell her this. But even after such an intense moment of passion, he worries she may be on the verge of leaving.

“I’ve had problems in the past. But I’ve been better lately. I think it’s because of you.”

“What could I have possibly done?” She asks. He laughs and weaves their fingers together.

“I have some…some anger issues. But they’ve been in check lately. I feel calmer when you’re with me. Your presence relaxes me, somehow. It’s good for me. I can’t promise that I’ll be perfect but I swear, I’ll be better,” he says. “You make me better.”

She smiles up at him, looking strangely tired. He is too, he realizes all at once. It has been a long day—from his father’s visit to Rey finding the drawer of sketches to… Rey. Rey, still here, sated and looking like she’s planning on sleeping in his bed.

She takes his head in her hands and looks at him, through sleepy, half-lidded eyes. She lets out a breath, like she’s been holding it for a long time, then says, “I want to be with you.”

He would be lying if he said those were the words he wanted. But this is Rey, and the desperation from earlier has ebbed out of his system, and he thinks that maybe this isn’t about him. Maybe this is what Rey is willing to give him right now.

And that’s enough for him.

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

It hasn't been this bad in years.

 

_She’s running, screaming. The two lights of the car fade to nothing, and she stops running, recognizing that her efforts are in vein. But then they reappear, bright and glaring, seemingly just beyond the thinnest screen of gray mist. It goes on for ages, and the pain in her lungs is side-splittingly real. Vibrant and harsh and impossible to ignore._

_The lights disappear again, but this time they do not return. Rey is alone, stumbling through darkness, when she hits a wall. She can trace the corners with her hands, feeling spider webs catch on her skin as she moves, and she knows where she is. A closet. Not big enough for her to lay straight, so she curls up on her side and just shakes._

_She’s hungry, thirsty. A low ache that persists despite the nauseating stench of her own piss, probably staining the floorboards and her clothes. She yells, once, some meaningless cry, for help, for freedom, for_ something to eat, please—

_The room shakes from all sides, a violent earthquake that makes her choke on the closet’s musky air. From outside, there’s a wordless roar that sends her rushing from the black—_

 

She wakes to Kylo’s darkened room, her heart beating out of her chest and a scream of terror so close to leaving her throat that it causes her physical pain to remain silent. She doesn’t know what time it is, but it is still dark out, so it can’t have been more than a few hours since they fell asleep together.

Kylo is lying beside her, naked and deep asleep. She struggles to get out of the bed without waking him. In the kitchen, she shakily takes a glass from the cabinet and fills it with water. She drinks it in one go, savoring the burn in her lungs, then refills it and has another drink. She leaves the glass on the counter and steps into the open space in the living room. She walks in tight circles, eyes squeezed tightly shut. She uses the same old technique to calm her nerves, to free her of the anxiety and all the other poisonous emotions constantly floating around her head— _the ocean, the island._

Jakku’s overstretched foster system shuffled Rey from home to home every few months until she was 10. Then, she was placed into the home of Unkar Plutt, a vile alcoholic living mostly off the money provided by the system. Looking back, Rey is relatively certain that such a man would not be permitted to be a foster parent in other parts of the country, where the foster system has better funding. But in Jakku, there were few options. With no orphanages in Niima, Rey would have had to be shipped out of the district to be placed in a government-run facility. She was recommended for it a few times, but her case was always bogged down by the broken bureaucrats, who couldn’t care about one child amongst the many.

There were five other children in Unkar Plutt’s home when Rey arrived, all older than her and mostly fending for themselves. Unkar wasn’t much for providing meals, despite that being one of the duties required as a foster parent, so the older kids tended to scavenge through the kitchen when he wasn’t looking, and get more substantial meals elsewhere. Rey, at ten years old, was incapable of this. She found herself alone most days, trying to skirt the attentions of a drunken Plutt, who had struck her across the face less than a day into her time in his home.

For eighteen months, she learned from the older kids and swiped bits of food from the cupboards when Plutt was away, either at work (on the few days he bothered) or briefly out to purchase more booze. There was never much there, but between that and the lunch meals at school, she was surviving.

Summer was harder. With no school to go to and the heat of the Jakku desert unbearable, there were fewer opportunities to get food. Plutt was less inclined to work than usual. She was forced to become more daring with her efforts—to take when Plutt was in the house, or even when he was just through the doorway in the living room.

It was inevitable that he would catch her. She’s blocked out some of the resulting fury, how he screamed and punched out. She remembers the jolts of movement rather than the pain itself. What she does remember, is the heart-wrenching fear when he dragged her down the hall and shoved her into the closet. Locked the door behind her.

She isn’t entirely sure how long she was in that closet. To Rey, it had felt endless. The time blended enough to feel like an eternity. Plutt insisted it had been only hours, that she had stolen money from him and he’d locked her away as a form of nonviolent punishment; Rey’s severe malnutrition, dehydration, and post-traumatic stress disorder said otherwise. Rey was hospitalized, the other foster kids were taken from his home, and he was charged with child abuse, but the shoddily done trial allowed Plutt to walk free after less than a year.

Rey, on the other hand, spent the next year in the children’s ward of Niima’s hospital, struggling through night after night of terrors and an inability to keep a decent amount of food down on any given day. She was discharged to new foster homes a few times, but each time ended up back in the hospital with the same problem—she either wouldn’t or couldn’t eat.

She remembers, as she entered the twelfth year of her life, thinking that this was it. She was going to die there, in that hospital bed. She remembers convincing herself that this, the wasting away of her body, was the only option for her.

The psychiatrist’s name was Dr. Kanata. She was a small, wisp of a woman, but even now Rey knows that woman saved her life. The other doctors were considering putting Rey on a feeding tube trial, _temporarily of course,_ but Dr. Kanata thought differently. Each day, she came to Rey and gave her a notepad and told her to draw whatever image came to her mind. Rey must have drawn other things at first. She remembers defiantly writing out curse words, or scribbling over the paper until the whole page was black. She remembers throwing the paper and pencil in Dr. Kanata’s face and turning onto her side. She doesn’t remember what it was that made her suddenly want to try.

Her drawings changes and morphed until suddenly she found herself drawing the island. She had never seen the ocean before. It frightened her. She imagined it as harsh and looming, unending and dark. The waves were too large, too uneven, but from below rose an island. Nothing comfortable or calming, but sturdy. Just a clump of jagged stone protruding from the sea. Stable despite the crashing waves. She began to imagine herself there, as an island. She could persist, survive, despite everything else. She could go on.

Years later, it is still that image that calms her. When she sits at her desk and sketches the water and stone, the other fears fade far away. She can forget.

She’s been such an idiot to not see the signs—the nightmares creeping back, the strange anxiousness blurring the edges of everything. The fear. She was fine, a month ago. Closed off maybe, but she had Finn and Poe and she was _better_ and she was _succeeding._ Only one thing has changed since then.

Kylo is bad for her. He’s making her relapse after almost ten years. It’s been happening since she first saw _Untitled,_ in that gallery.

It’s not his fault, he doesn’t even know how he affects her, but it doesn’t change the fact that if Rey continues along this trajectory with him, she will lose everything. Everything she’s worked so hard for. She’ll wake up one day, months from now, in Kylo’s bed, unable to eat, unable to move, uncaring that the career she struggled financially for four years to acquire is in ruins because _she couldn’t hold it together._ She knows how lucky she’s been. She knows what the track is for kids in the Jakku foster system. It’s certainly not a university education in Coruscant, a promising career in a major company. It’s drugs and poverty and _if she’s lucky_ a job at that run-down gas station where she was abandoned.

A traitorous voice in her head tells her she has another choice. That Kylo will take care of her; he _loves_ her. That _this_ is more important than her ambitions and independence. She remembers that moment, hours ago, before her nightmares poisoned everything. She remembers looking into Kylo’s eyes as they came together, moaning his name. She remembers, in the post-orgasmic haze, as Kylo confessed his love again, how she had thought the universe must have been put together _for this._ For her and Kylo to meet and be together.

They fit so well, it seemed the only explanation. But now, she’s at a crossroads again. She sees her choices laid out before her—two diverging paths—and she sees Kylo for what he has been since the beginning: a temptation.

She’s crying, something she hasn’t done in _years_ , not since she was a lonely, malnourished kid in an abusive foster home, with bruises on her stomach and her ribs protruding from sheer hunger. She’s kept the dams shut for so long, but now they’re broken.

“Why are you out here?” Kylo asks from the doorway.

She thinks of everything in her head, all the things she can’t say. _I can’t fight your demons if I can’t even fight my own. You make the pain and the loneliness come back. You make me weak. I can’t be weak again._

If the words come out, they’ll be real. The abandonment at a gas station was one thing, too much of her origin to hide, but the closet and the hunger is something else entirely. She left that fear behind, buried it. Her coping technique (drawing the same image, repeatedly) may have been rudimentary, but it was working.

He notices her shaking, choking sobs and rushes forward, whispering, “Rey? What’s wrong?”

But he is only two steps across the room before she steps back, holding out her hands defensively.

“Don’t—” Don’t _touch me._ He halts in his tracks. She can barely speak, and the words that she does manage to say are so pitiful, so scared, she’s embarrassed for herself. “Stay back.”

His eyes are wide. His outstretched hands shake once, like a shudder going through his whole body, before they drop to his sides. He opens his mouth like he’s going to say something and she can hear the words: _I’m not going to hurt you._ But then he stops, the words go unspoken, and an unnamable emotion sweeps over his face. Something like betrayal, but more bitter, more destructive.

He doesn’t understand. He thinks that she was lying, mere hours ago, when she said she wanted to be with him, when she was inches from saying _I love you._ He thinks she’s afraid he’ll grab her, violently. But she can’t say it, can’t get out the words that will set him at ease. She can’t let him know how weak she is, because then it will be real, it won’t be a feeling in her head that she can stamp out by sketching an ocean, practicing breathing techniques, and focusing all her energies on her studies—and _god,_ has she always been this _selfish?_

She looks into his eyes, and it’s like the earth between them has ripped apart. It’s like there’s a chasm between them, growing larger by the second, and there’s nothing she can do to stop it.

He turns away from her, taking the glass of water she had been drinking and taking a long sip. She thinks he’ll go back into his room.

Then, he slams the glass against the countertop.

The sound of the shattering makes a small scream escape her lips, makes her hands fly to her face.

Her knees go weak and she finds herself kneeling on the floor, the tears coming harder and harder. This single act, this expression of unrestrained rage, has confirmed all the rumors and fears about Kylo Ren—her anxieties from the first night they met, when she looked at those paintings. The heat of _Cauterize_ floods her vision, and when she looks at him now, that’s all she can see—the flames tearing him apart. The lonely mist of _Untitled_ surrounding him from every side.

She can’t let the same thing happen to her.

There’s blood on his hand, dripping on the floor. He turns back around and looks in her direction. Rey wonders what he sees now, when he looks at the space she occupies. She wonders what he will draw now, when he thinks of her.

“Get out,” he says.

She doesn’t apologize, doesn’t speak, doesn’t even nod. She grabs her things from the bedroom on her way out the door.

* * *

 

Kylo Ren cleans the glass off the counter and the floor, carefully picks each shard from his palm. He washes the blood away, only to catch sight of his face in the mirror and smash his fist into it. It shatters, but stays mostly intact, and he pummels his fist against it until the glass is in the sink and on the floor. Where the mirror was before, it’s just black.

He lets out a yell, and it sounds neither like a swear nor a name. It’s just sound, and its so loud in the bathroom, bouncing against the tiled walls, that it rings in his eardrums for seconds afterward. When the sound of his own voice is gone, all he can hear is the sound of fear she’d made when the glass shattered, echoing in his ears even now.  

He can’t breath. He moves aimlessly around his apartment, looking desperately for anything she left behind.

He’s being torn apart.

* * *

 

Outside, it is still raining. Rey walks in it for hours, trying to find her way home.

 

_**End.** _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Listen](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3d7Yl135twU)
> 
> [Listen](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnkzvAXWV-0)

**Author's Note:**

> luvkurai.tumblr.com


End file.
